Nigel Ayers

Aquarius, the water-carrier of Altarnun

2012-02-01T05:46:00.000-08:00

The sun is in this sign from 20^th January to 19^th February. An air sign.
Key words: clubs, revolutionary, waves, telepathy, eccentric, perverse, intuition, freedom, protest, reform, disruption.
Light or planet: Uranus.
Body parts: ankles, calves, circulation.

This constellation was known to the ancient Babylonians as a man carrying a jug containing water, the source of life. The jug is a group of stars that include Eta, Pi, Gamma and Zeta Aquari. Alpha Aquari – Sadalmelik of 3.0 Magnitude is 760 light years away from earth. Its name derives from the Arabic Al sad al Melik meaning “the lucky one of the king”. It is a yellow supergiant of spectral class G”. Beta Aquari also known as Sadalsuud “the lucky of the luckiest” is of 2.9 Magnitude and 610 light years away. It is another yellow supergiant of the spectral class G0. Zeta Aquari is a double star of 4.3 and 4.5 Magnitude, separated by 2.0”. After 2160 this distance will have grown to 6.0”. The period of revolution is 856 years and the system is 104 light years away. The constellation of Aquarius is formed by the area between St Clether and Laneast to the north, to Trewint in the south. The head of Aquarius lies over Trewint, beside Wesley Cottage and the body covers Altarnun. The feet of the figure lie on the holy wells of St Clether and Laneast. Sadalachbia lies over Treween. Sadalsuud is over Newhay. Ancha is near the phone-box at Lower Tregunnon. The Saturn nebula is near St Clether.

The sign of Aquarius the water-carrier coincides with the Celtic feast of Imbolc, also known as Candlemas, which is connected with wells and water. Imbolc is one of the four principal festivals of the Irish calendar, celebrated either at the beginning of February or at the first local signs of Spring. Originally dedicated to the goddess Brigid, in the Christian period it was adopted as St Brigid’s Day. In Scotland the festival is also known as Là Fhèill Brìghde, in Ireland as Lá Fhéile Bríde, and in Wales as Gwyl Ffraed. Imbolc is traditionally a time of weather prognostication, and the old tradition of watching to see if serpents or badgers came from their winter dens is perhaps a precursor to Groundhog Day. Fire and purification are considered by many to be important aspects of this festival. Brigid (also known as Brighid, Brigit,) is the goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft. As both goddess and saint she is also associated with holy wells, sacred flames, and healing. To some, the lighting of candles and fires represents the return of warmth and the increasing power of the sun over the coming months.

Nocturnal Emissions: Tharmuncrape an'goo

2012-01-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

<a href="http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/album/tharmuncrape-angoo">Tharmuncrape an'goo by Nocturnal Emissions</a>

Nigel Ayers on New Sounds WNYC National Public Radio 1991

2012-01-02T05:20:00.000-08:00

Nigel Ayers on New Sounds WNYC National Public Radio 1991
Nigel Ayers on New Sounds WNYC National Public Radio 1991

It's not that I'm willfully obscure, I just don't often get asked to talk about my music on national radio. If they ask me, I'll do it.
I just found this recording of a US-syndicated programme I was on twenty-odd years ago - back in the days when you weren't supposed to say "penis" on the radio.

Bodmin Moor Zodiac: Capricorn, the Polyphant Sea-Goat

2011-12-30T08:27:00.001-08:00

If one places an abstract composition - which is simply a fragmentary purification of the former object - in (or alongside) a figurative structure, this second composition digests the first one - transformed into a decorative motif - and then the whole work becomes figurative. However if one places a letterist notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one which assimilates the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or super-writing."
Isidore Isou
The Force Fields of Letterist Painting

The sun is in this sign from 23rd December to 19th January. An earth sign.
Key words: aspiring, responsible, cold, prudent, self-contained, persevering, methodical, plodding, modest, exacting.
Light or planet: Saturn.
Body parts: skin, bones.

Capricorn is in an ocean-oriented part of the northern autumnal sky, along with Aquarius the water-carrier, the Whale, the Dolphin, the southern Fish and the two fish of the zodiac sign of Pisces. 2500 years ago the winter solstice occurred in the sign of Capricorn which was then a water sign. Records from around 600 BC describe the Sumerian vision of the world as a round plateau ringed with mountains which supported the domed sky. It floated on primordial water which broke through the earth’s surface as fresh water springs. The god Ea told the Uta-Napishtim to build an ark, in an earlier version of the biblical story of Noah. Ea emerged four times, at long intervals, in human form wearing a fish-tailed coat. Later Capricorn became an earth sign, associated with the Greek goat god Pan. Pan was feasting with other gods when suddenly the monster Typhon appeared. To escape it, the gods changed into beasts. Pan however panicked and jumped into a river before he had properly changed into a goat. So his lower extremities changed into a fish tail. This arrangement was so much to Zeus’ liking that he placed the Sea-Goat in the sky. There was a belief in the Middle Ages that everything on land had a counterpart in the sea; we find bishopfish, monkfish, dogfish, catfish, swanfish, the horsefish/ seahorse and the goatfish which also represents the time of Christmas, the winter solstice and the New Year. Alpha Capricorni, known as Giedi or Algiedi is an optical double. The stars are actually far apart from each other in space, but as they lie in nearly the same direction from earth they appear to be next to one another. The brighter Alpha 2 is 109 light years away, the fainter Alpha 1 is about 690 light years away. Both are double stars.
Celestial bodies are not where we see them, light beams are refracted by the many thin layers of the earth’s atmosphere. Temperature differences and movements of atmospheric layers cause fast and irregular changes in the direction of light beams. For the same reason scintillation, the twinkling of stars occurs. Time also doesn’t actually move in a straight line. It is cyclic. The modern linear concept of time strikingly resembles the traditional Judaeo-Christian concept, and it strikingly differs from that of the ancient Greeks and Indians. The cosmological ideas of several prominent Greek thinkers included a cyclic or episodic time similar to that found in the Vedic literature of India. For example, we find in Hesiod’s Works and Days a series of Ages (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron) similar to the Indian Yugas (Ages). In both systems the quality of human life becomes progressively worse with each passing age. In On Nature, Empedocles speaks of cosmic time cycles. In Plato’s dialogues, there are descriptions of revolving time and recurring catastrophes destroying or nearly destroying human civilisation. Aristotle is often quoted as saying that the arts and sciences had been discovered many times in the past. In the teachings of Plato, Pythagoras, and Empedocles on the transmigration of the soul, the cyclical pattern extends to individual psycho-physical existence. The great circle of the Bodmin Moor Zodiac becomes a succession of impressions that leave their traces across the subjectivity of the walker. To experience the Moor in such a way is to formulate, describe and articulate a renewed subjectivity; it is to once again lose one’s way to recreate and display oneself in the otherworldly environment. The problem here is that to lose one’s way seems to be to configure a subjectivity by aligning one’s path with those already inscribed upon the landscape by those who maintain, through the authority of their accumulated capital, the capacity to structure it. It is a matter of leaving a solid base in the present, to lose one’s way in order to find those potentialities already inherent in the Moor as it is currently perceived.

Twelve Ritual Walks on Bodmin Moor

2011-12-23T04:10:00.000-08:00

Twelve Ritual Walks on Bodmin Moor

Expressed as Astronomical, Astrological and Global Positioning Satellite Data

Images from Google Earth
Soundtrack "Soul Zodiac" by Cannonball Adderley (1972)
Timestretched remix by Nigel Ayers (2006)

The British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet

2011-11-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

Nigel Ayers casts a sceptical eye over The British Art Show (for artcornwall.org)

Up the marble staircase of the Plymouth City Museum and past all the natural history stuff and there’s bits of window frames on wheels that look like they’ve been salvaged from skips. It’s the British Art Show, but times are hard and the quality of found objects has dropped: so much for readymades, it’s cheaper to paint on canvas these days.

So we go into the gallery upstairs, and there are plain brown MDF oblong plinths, each with a pair of breezeblocks on them. On top are tights stuffed with kapok in a style typical of Sarah Lucas. And what I like is that they refer to the body in a very British way. We don’t have the same relationship with our bodies that they do in countries where people don’t giggle at nudists. These knotted tights, they are actually really good. Some critic mentioned an art-historical reference to Bellmer, but to me it’s more like Bill Brandt’s photos of arm-holes and folds of nude flesh that look like pebbles, and pebbles that look like tits and arses. Sarah Lucas rocks in the rock ‘n’ roll sense, not in the carved-in-stone sense.

Anyway, that stuff’s by the door. And you walk past it and there’s a load more old window frames that have been built up and made into a big tall kind of platform construction with some cushions on it. They remind me a bit of a 70's Habitat book I once had, where it was all platform beds, and bean bags and these little carpeted niches in the floor where you could do all your wife-swapping and drink Matteus Rose. In the handout it says its by Spartacus Chetwynd and that its influences include a load of things. Maybe I’ll look them up. Maybe I won’t bother...

There’s some paintings on the walls round the edges, but they don’t really register with me. There’s also some down the far end. They're a really dull colour of really boring scenes in Coventry: a football pitch beside council flats and graffitie’d walls. Places where nothing big and important ever happened, but where people live and kids grow up. I like these. The label says they're by George Shaw and they’re painted in Humbrol paint. Wow. I start doing mental calculations on how much all the little pots of paint must have cost. I’m thinking on hundreds and hundreds of those little pots you use for airfix kits in colours like British racing green and Pillarbox Red. Proper old fashioned colours you don’t get any more.

And on the right there’s a video playing and there’s some statue or something borrowed from another museum. And there’s a huge glass box with a life size mannequin in it and a stuffed lizard with two heads and a load of sand and tree branches. It's by Charles Avery and it looks a bit like props from Lord of the Rings.

At the Peninsula Arts Centre, Plymouth University across the road, the Brit Art art show continues. There are flimsy wooden trestle tables with magazine and newspaper cuttings under Perspex by Wolfgang Tilmans. The one image of all the dozens of images that sticks in my mind, like atrocities tend to, is one of two guys about to be publicly hanged in Iran for being gay. Makes you wonder what you can do about it. And there’s lots of other stuff about religious intolerance and the catholic church. And so this must be the research material Wolfgang Tillmanns has collected over the year. And what does he do with it? There’s a wall-sized digital print of green on green smears. Not my favourite colour. Not very well-mounted on the wall. I don’t get it. Is this abstract image a response to the horror? It’s sort of anti-humanistic, but wouldn’t exist without complex chemical processes and all that digital malarkey. And the way it hangs, you don’t really notice it.

And there’s a room that you can walk into through a curtain and it’s pitch black. It’s really black, not just subdued lighting. You bump into people but at least you can see the projection properly, for what it’s worth. There’s an old-school 16mm film loop running in a booth and some electronic sounds, and some images on a the screen but I can’t remember what they were. It could have been anything, whatever it was, I wasn’t taking notes at the time and I’ve forgotten.

Then over at the Art school, they’ve got this huge head made out of old canvas tents hanging on ropes and tarpaulin with lots of little sew-on souvenir travel badges on it. And it looks like Mickey Mouse, except it’s a teddy bear head. Brian Griffiths. I like it, but I’m childish. It brings out the infantile in me. And it reminds me of going camping when I was a kid, when tents were tents, proper solid, heavy, canvas things, not the farty non-degradable things Milletts sell for festivals.

Onwards I trek, to the worst-named art space in the west of England, The Slaughterhouse. It’s a 40 minute walk out of the city centre, out past the Brittany Ferry port, past the army base with the marine on the gate holding a bloody big gun, to Prince William’s yard. They’ve got some installations set up that are all a bit boring. Matthew Darbyshire’s one’s like a gift shop anywhere. Down at the far end there’s one of Marclay’s turntables, with a transistor radio on it and a DVD player instant retro.

Then there this other really dark room, which, when your eyes eventually adjust you realise is a proper little cinema, with proper seating. They’re showing Christian Marclay’s "The Clock". So I stand and watch, while my eyes adjust. I don’t really like watching videos in galleries, but this one really starts to draw you in. It’s lots of short bits of film, clipped from films dating back maybe 80 years and more recent ones like The Big Lebowski and every so often there’s a close up of a clock or a watch. And after a few minutes I notice that all the clocks are at ten to four, so I’m wondering how many films are there where the clock is a ten to four. Is this some stock footage that got used over and over?

Then I look at my watch and my watch says ten to four. Then the clocks and watches in the film move to five to four, then it dawns on me it’s been edited to synch to real time and it’s 24 hours long. So I take a seat and watch for half an hour, even though I’m short of time and need to head back soon. I could have watched it for hours and hours. I might go back and do just that. The guy has done something new and relevant using materials that are around us all the time. But he’s used them in a new way. You couldn’t really do this kind of thing without digital editing, and there being an incredible number of films easily available everywhere. Anyway you get these bits of drama and rising tension, and suspense around revolving around this clock motif. It’s profound.

There’s another dark room and there’s a more narrative kind of film running, with actors in a pub, some sort of mildly surreal things going on. In the corner there’s an animatronic rubber head with rolling eyes constantly spewing out white liquid that’s pumped round and round. It's by Nathaniel Mellors and I like that too.

And that’s about it.

When I look at art like this, which has great deal of art historical precedents, I find myself thinking things like: who is this art for? Rich people? Academics? Why do the Hayward Gallery curators consider it important and British and relevant? Aren’t a lot of these artists just up their own arses in a big farty art bubble? They call it The British Art Show, but at least one of the best artists in it isn’t British and doesn’t live in Britain. And it’s nothing much at all to do with any comet, unless “Comet” means the electrical shop. A high percentage of the pieces in this show are, art historically self-referential hyper-specialized, dry, academic and incredibly pretentious. The references to other existing art is stifling. The painting styles are labored and dullsville.

The downside of this kind of art is you come away from it feeling very baffled and switched off. There isn’t a way into it without specialised knowledge. On the plus side, they’ve got this great thing going where the projections are in very, very dark rooms, without any of that health and safety nonsense. And you could while away a rainy day watching that Marclay film. And it’s free.

The British Art Show Plymouth 17 September – 4 December

Bodmin Moor Zodiac: Sagittarius, the archer of Coad's Green

2011-11-27T07:43:00.000-08:00

The sun is in this sign from 23^rd November to 22^nd December. A fire sign.

Key words: travel, philosophy, religion, tolerance, walking, space, freedom, aspiration, idealist, moralist, optimist, justice, exaggeration.
Light or planet: Jupiter.
Body parts: liver, hips, thighs.

The mid December solstice marks the beginning of winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern hemisphere. While the beginning of summer marks the longest day of the year, the winter solstice brings the shortest day of work and the longest night of sex magick of the year.

The Archer’s stars can be seen in the brightest part of the Milky Way in the direction of the centre of the galaxy. The constellation offers a richer display of star fields, cluster and nebulas than any other constellation. The diffuse nebula M8, the Lagoon Nebula, M20, the Trifid Nebula and M17 the Omega or Horseshoe all lie within this constellation. Sagittarius (the Archer), is drawn in the form of a centaur. The half-human and half-animal composition of the centaur has led many writers to treat them as liminal beings, caught between the two natures, embodied in contrasted myths, and as the embodiment of untamed nature. The most common theory holds that the idea of centaurs came from the first reaction of a non-riding culture, as in the Minoan Aegian world, to nomads who were mounted on horses.

In the middle of Sagittarius’ horse body on the B3254 a signboard points to the Racehorse Inn in North Hill, a free house offering local homemade quality food and local real ales. The point of the centaur’s arrow lies on Example Cross, the hand holding the longbow is on Longdon’s Cross, The centaur’s tail lies on Coad’s Green and its feet lie on Berrowbridge.

While on older star maps Sagittarius is represented as a centaur, on modern maps of the southern hemisphere it is usually represented by a drawing of the Teapot. Steam appears to rise from the spout, thanks to a star cloud.

Compost: Live at Tate St Ives

2011-11-20T06:59:00.000-08:00

Field Club & Friends - late at the Tate St Ives
Friday 25 November: FREE ADMISSION

Multimedia artist Nigel Ayers, will perform a live psycho-acoustic set to accompany his new work 'Compost' – a forty minute digital animation that visually isolates biotic elements of a compost heap and subjects them to crypto-zoological distortion.

Nocturnal Emissions live dates in Germany

2011-11-11T03:43:00.000-08:00

Saturday 12 November

Nocturnal Emissions (UK)
Shiny Toys-Festival für audiovisuelle Experimente
Samstag, 12. November 2011 / 19:00 Uhr
Festival
Bollwerk 107
Homberger Strasse 107, 47441 Moers
Deutschland

Sunday 13 November
Nocturnal Emissions (UK)
Broken sound 10
w/ Mohammad / Konrad Kraft (GR / D)http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Sonntag, 13. November 2011 / 20:30 Uhr
Konzert
Eintritt: 12,00 EURO

Wednesday 16 November
Nocturnal Emissions (UK)
Mittwoch, 16. November 2011 / 20:00 Uhr
Konzert
Eintritt: 5,00 EURO
Institut für neue Medien (INM)
Schmickstraße 18, 60314 Frankfurt
Deutschland
Thursday 17 November
Nocturnal Emissions (UK)
w/ Emerge / Sustained Development (D / D)
Donnerstag, 17. November 2011
Konzert
Ganze Bäckerei
Reitmayrgäßchen 4, 86152 Augsburg
Deutschland

Friday 18 November
Nocturnal Emissions (UK)
Geräuschwelten #62
w/ 1000schoen / Moloch (D / D)
Freitag, 18. November 2011 / 20:00
Konzert
Eintritt: 10,- EURO
Black Box
Achtermannstr. 12, 48143 Münster
Deutschland

see
http://www.aufabwegen.de/events

Compost (extract)

2011-11-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

No animals were harmed in the making of this feature.

Soundtrack:
http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/track/black-sites

Shiny Toys Festival Moers

2011-10-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Shows also coming up in Frankfurt and Augsburg...
stay tuned

Scorpio, the scorpion of Pensilva

2011-10-25T06:28:00.000-07:00

If the slope of a hill comes between the eye and the horizon, sloping towards the eye, while the eye is opposite the middle of the height of this slope, then that hill will increase in darkness throughout its length. This is proved by the 7th of this which says that a tree looks darkest when it is seen from below; the proposition is verified, since this hill will, on its upper half show all its trees as much from the side which is lighted by the light of the sky, as from that which is in shade from the darkness of the earth; whence it must result that these trees are of a medium darkness. And from this [middle] spot towards the base of the hill, these trees will be lighter by degrees by the converse of the 7^th and by the said 7th: For trees so placed, the nearer they are to the summit of the hill the darker they necessarily become. But this darkness is not in proportion to the distance, by the 8th of this which says: That object shows darkest which is [seen] in the clearest atmosphere; and by the 10th: That shows darkest which stands out against a lighter background.

Leonardo da Vinci
Of Painting in a Landscape

The sun is in this sign from 24^th October to 22^nd November. A water sign.
Key words: creation, birth, death, sex, regeneration, passion, research, secretiveness.
Light or planet: Pluto.
Body parts: sexual organs.

Scorpio is one of the few constellations whose shape corresponds to its name. Scorpio is the scorpion which killed Orion the hunter at the command of Artemis, the goddess of hunting and the moon. The Scorpion was also thought to have stung the horses of the sun god’s chariot when Phaeton drove them, causing them to bolt and career through the heavens, drying up rivers and scorching the earth below. In around 5000 BC, this scorpion was sacred to the god of war and was a symbol of the darkness and decay of the waning year. A scorpion-man who guarded the gates of the sunrise challenged the hero Gilgamesh. For alchemists, November, the season of Scorpio was the busiest time of year. This was when spirit could be released and base metal could be transmuted into gold. The pincers of the original Scorpio reached as far as the present-day scales of Libra. The present Scorpio lies between Libra and the centaur Sagittarius. Alpha Scorpii is known as Antares meaning “against Mars” because its red colour rivals Mars. It is a red super giant of the spectral class M1 which changes its brightness irregularly from 0.9 to 1.1 Magnitude. Its diameter is about 950 million kilometres but its mass is only 15-25 suns, as a result the density of the giant is extremely low. In the open star cluster M7-NGC 6475 of total brightness 3.3 Magnitude, it is possible to see 50 to 80 stars, the brightest of which are of 7.0 Magnitude. It is about 800 light years away from us. North of the Scorpion’s tail lies the Butterfly star cluster, appearing to the naked eye as a fuzzy patch half the diameter of the full moon.

LIVE SHOWS COMING UP IN NOVEMBER 2011

2011-10-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

12.11. 2011
NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS
at
Shiny Toys Festival
Moers
http://www.shinytoys.eu

-----------

13.11.2011, 20.00h, tickets 10 eur presale, 12 eur on the door
aufabwegen presents:
Broken Sound #10

NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS (UK)
+
MOHAMMAD (GR)
+
KONRAD KRAFT (D)

Studio 672/Stadtgarten
Venloer Str.
50672 Cologne
Germany

-----------

18.11.2011, 20.00h tickets: 10 eur
auabwegen presents:
geraeuschwelten #61

NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS (UK)
+
1000SCHOEN (D)

+
DAS MOLOCH (D)

Blackbox/cuba-cultur
Achtermannstr. 12
48143 Münster

www.aufabwegen.de

www.blackbox-muenster.de

Libra, The Scales of St Cleer

2011-09-23T17:23:00.001-07:00

The scales are an analogue device that measures continuous information in an infinite number of possible values. The only limitation on resolution is the accuracy of the measuring device. By contrast, a digital system is one that uses discrete values, representing numbers or non-numeric symbols such as letters or icons, for input, processing, transmission, storage, or display.

The scales lie around Rosecraddock and close to the Wheal Tor Inn, the highest inn in Cornwall. The handle of the scales is formed by the road that runs from St Cleer through Tremar Coombe past Polwrath to Darite. From the church at Darite, through Crow's Nest to Higher Trethake runs the cord that suspends the northern scale which is formed by a system of fields on Fore Down. Below the northern Scale lies Newton Farm, this reminds us of Newton's discovery of gravity as the force that works the scales. The process of weighing is suggested by hamlet immediately below the scale, known as Wayland. The cord which suspends the southern scale is formed by the road that runs from St Cleer Post Office across St Cleer Downs, past the water works. The southern scale itself is formed by a complex of fields enclosing Trenabe and Treneath.

St Cleer is one of the larger Cornish parishes and has been inhabited for more than 6000 years. The village has two public houses, a post office and a general store. For thousands of years metal ores have been dug from the ground in this parish, first tin ores from open works and later copper ore from deep mines. In the nineteenth century 3000 men, women and children were employed in mining, a boom that led to the building of new villages like Darite and Minions. St Cleer Well, sanctified by St. Clarus, was said to cure insanity and blindness when a patient was ducked in the water.

Virgo, the Virgin of Dobwalls

2011-08-30T10:36:00.001-07:00

The sun is in this sign from 24th August to 23rd September. An earth sign.
Key words: work, diet, natural, harvest, corn, animals, health, teaching, precision, analysis, handiwork, details, criticism.
Light or planet: Mercury.
Body parts: nervous system, intestines.
In mythology Virgo, the Virgin, is associated with the goddesses of justice or crops. Justice is symbolised by the adjacent scales of Libra, the crops are represented by the corn ears that Virgo holds in the area of the bright star with the Latin name Spica which means corn ear. Spica is known as Alpha Virginis, of 0.9 Magnitude, with variations of about 0.05 Magnitude and 1,600 suns in luminosity. Gamma Virginis, or Porrima of 2.9 Magnitude is a binary of a 171 year period. The components are closing in at present. Porrima was a Roman goddess of prophecy. The large cluster of galaxies in Virgo extends far beyond the boundaries of the adjacent Berenice’s Hair (Coma Berenices). The origins of the cult of the great goddesses, who was both virgin and mother, are prehistoric, but for recorded history she has been associated with Virgo, through which the sun passes around harvest-time. She is known as the ancient Babylonian goddess Ishtar, Queen of the Stars, lover of the corn god Tammuz. She mourns his death every autumn when he is cut down in his prime. During the winter, she journeys to the Underworld to bring him back after which he appears as new, green corn every spring.
Stories of the Roman Venus and Adonis and of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, and the Asiatic Cybele and Attis are all variations on this theme. As Virgo follows Leo on the zodiac cycle, the chariot of Cybele is drawn by lions. Virgo is also Demeter, the goddess of the corn as well as her daughter Persephone who spends the winter in the Underworld and returns to earth each spring. Virgo is also Urania, the muse of astronomy, placed in the sky by Apollo, the god of music and prophecy. Virgo was known as Astraea, the goddess of justice and of the laws of nature, the last of the immortals to leave after the Gold, Silver and Bronze Ages gave way to the modern Age of Iron. Her promised return, and the imminent birth of a child who would restore the Golden Age, made it easy for the Christians to see Virgo as the Virgin Mary.

Imaginary Time

2011-08-22T10:36:00.001-07:00

Imaginary Time '99 (Revolutiuonary Industrial Trance Mix) by Nocturnal Emissions

Imaginary Time by Nocturnal Emissions

Friction and Dirt

2011-08-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

<a href="http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/album/friction-and-dirt">Friction and Dirt by Nocturnal Emissions</a>
Recorded in 1995.

Oscillators

2011-08-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

A web-based sound sculpture at
http://www.nigelayers.com/oscillators.html

Autonomia

2011-07-30T02:45:00.000-07:00

Autonomia by Nocturnal Emissions
Released in 1996.

Futurist Antiquarianism

2011-07-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

Futurist Antiquarianism by Nocturnal Emissions
First released in 2000.

Leo, the Lion of Goonzion

2011-07-24T02:07:00.000-07:00

Leo (The Lion)

Many sightings of the Beast of Bodmin Moor say that it is lion-like, this could be a thought form emanation from the Leo Zodiac outline, which in turn may indicate the boundaries of a Mesolithic (and later Celtic) tribal area.

Leo’s body lies over Goonzion Downs, he is the Lion of Goonzion. Leo also stands on the village of Ley, it could be said that he is a “Ley lion”. Another place name that makes up his outline is Luna. Luna is the Latin name of the Earth's Moon as well as the Roman moon goddess Luna. Leo also stands over the 1412 Pant(h)ers Bridge.

The 'Roaring Shaft' in the complex of mines on Goonzion Down has been said to make a roar like 'a battery of stamps falling regularly with thuds and reverberated through the ground'. These noises may have been natural in origin, but they served to feed the dark images of monstrous beasts and spirits in the minds of those who worked to mine copper, silver and gold.

The sun is in this sign from 24th July to 23rd August. A fire sign.
Key words: kingship, fatherhood, jewels, gold, regal, warmth, fire, sunshine, drama, happiness, command, courage, size, creation, breadth.
Light or planet: the sun.
Body parts: heart, back.

In common with our predecessors Katherine Maltwood (Glastonbury Zodiac), Mary Caine (Glastonbury & Kingston Zodiacs) and Sheila Jeffries (Lizard Zodiac), we begin our exploration with the sign of Leo. The constellation of Leo has been known for more than 5000 years. It was identified in Mesopotamia, when the sun stood in Leo at the time of the summer solstice, its symbol expressing the power of the sun god. Leo is one of the few constellations whose shape clearly corresponds with its name. Alpha Leonis is known as Regula, of 1.4 Magnitude, one of the stars of the Spring Triangle. It is about twice as big as the sun, with 120 times the sun’s luminosity. It is a blue-white star of spectral class B7 with surface temperature of 14,000 K and lies about 78 lights years away from us. Gamma Leonis known as Algieba is one of the most beautiful binary stars. Its components of 2.4 and 3.6 Magnitude are both golden yellow and orbit each other about every 600 years. Their distance is 126 years away from us. R Leonis, a red giant is among the long-period variable stars of the Mira Ceti type. It changes its brightness between 4.4 and 11.3 Magnitude in a course of 310 days. Leo contains many bright galaxies.

According to Greek mythology the first labour of the solar hero Hercules was to kill the Nemian Lion. His enemy, Hera, queen of the heavens, sent it from the moon. A lion is the symbol of St Mark. According to the Bestiary, lions sleep with their eyes open. Lions when hunted would cover their tracks to avoid pursuit. Lions are born dead. Human beings do not enrage a lion so long as they do not harm him. A lion is afraid of a white cock. A lion spares prisoners and those lying on the ground and will eat an ape when ill. Leo is a Lion of Goonzion, whose body lies over Goonzion Downs. Ras Elased Borealis and Ras Elased Australis lie in the parish of Warleggan. The star Zosma lies near the holy well in St Neot.

On 21st July 2006, at 14.36 travelling from Fletchers Bridge towards the sign of Leo, we glimpse a fairy in the bushes on the right hand side of the lane. We stop to investigate further. The fairy wears a lace tutu and pearly earrings and is approximately two feet tall. She has red lips and blue almond shaped eyes. She is smiling and has her arms raised in what would be a ten-past-nine position on a clock face. Her left leg is outstretched and her right leg is bent so that the left foot touches the back of the knee of the right leg. The fairy appears to be made from scrap materials such as old nylon tights and pieces of fabric cut from old curtain material. She is filled like a soft toy and suspended from the bushes by further scraps of material hidden behind her. We continue in a winding, roughly southeast direction, passing Tredale Farm, Pinsla Garden and Nursery, through Pinsla Downs past Gwel An-Nans Farm. At 14.43 we see a wooden signpost, mounted with wrought iron supports on a stone base. The top wooden part of the sign points in four directions, CARDINHAM, WARLEGGAN, and BODMIN are visible, the words on the fourth arm of this sign are slightly obscured but we can make out …DENWELL & CABILLA MANOR. The woodwork of the sign post is painted white, the lettering in black. Rather than having pointed ends, the ends of the signposts are cut with rounded ends, forming semicircular domes rather than points. There is fifth lower post, also cut in this manner, which is set into the wrought iron below the main cross section of the sign post. This post reads: MOUNT and the word is followed by a small painted arrow. We continue down the road through the small village of Mount. In a gap between two dry stone walls at the right hand side of the road, nine stone steps lead up to a small iron gate. Two signs are fixed to the gate. One reads:
NO
UNAUTHORISED
ENTRY
in red lettering. The other larger sign reads
SOUTH WEST WATER
MOUNT
WASTE WATER TREATMENT WORKS
NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY
A circular filter bed lies in the enclosed space behind the gate. We pass Bofindle Farm on our left and then South Bofindle Farm on our right. We pause at Panters Bridge. On a stone to the right of the bridge there is a green metal sign with a white rounded edge. Some of the white lettering on this sign is missing. It reads:
ANTE S BRIDGE
RI ER BEDALDER
IR A 1415
Grass, stinging nettles and other foliage surround the sign. A rectangular Highways Department sign is fixed to a stone beside the bridge. The sign is painted in white and grey sections. The section with the white background takes up the top one third of the sign and the section with the grey background takes up the bottom two thirds of the sign. In the top section written in black letters are the words WEAK BRIDGE, in the bottom section a smaller white area is enclosed by a red circle. Within the circle are the black letters
3T
mgw
We continue onwards to the village of St Neot. Two old millstones lean against the wall of a building in the street, they are of equal size. There is a quantity of lichen on the millstone on the left. The bottom edges of these stones are flat, so they rest neatly upon the tarmac without rolling away. To the right of the millstones is a white plastic drain spout, draining rainwater from the roof of the property into a gutter beside the millstones. Behind a public bench constructed from concrete sides and wooden seat supports we see a group of three sculpted figures. There are two pieces mounted upon a stone wall and both approximately two feet in height. They are made from scrap materials in a similar style to the fairy we saw near Fletchers Bridge. These figures sit on the wall and are clothed in coloured fabric. They both have heads made from papier-mâché onto which stylised details have been a painted using a palette of primary colours, with shades of brown to represent skin tone. The left sitting figure wears a blue knitted hat striped in shades of blue and purple. Yellow cord-like fabric extrudes from this hat to suggest two pigtails. The left pigtail stands straight upright, while the right pigtail forms a semicircle. This pigtail is attached to the branch of a bush growing above it. The figure wears a pink jumper with a light blue and green patchwork design sewn to its front. It wears white trousers; a green and black scarf is knotted around its neck. Straw extrudes from the wrists and ankles of this figure. The straw is tied at the wrists with orange baler twine. The wide blue eyes of this figure stare straight ahead. The seated figure on the right has been fitted with a wig made from black wool. Its head faces over its left shoulder and its eyes are closed. It wears a dark woollen hat. Navy blue material covers its arms and legs, with two white stripes on each of its arms. Brown fabric covers the body of this figure. A necktie decorated with parallel red, white and black diagonal stripes is tied around its neck. It wears candy-striped leggings, from the ankles of which pieces of straw extrude. Straw also extrudes from the wrists of this figure. Between the legs of this figure, there is a yellow object of a similar size and shape to a lemon. It stands on one of its narrow ends. There is a face painted on this lemon-shaped object. A third figure stands to the left of the two seated figures, by the side of a stone water culvert. This figure is wearing a hooded cape made of brown fabric, over dark coloured undergarments. It has a leather belt buckled around its waist. It is wearing the black headphones of a walkman or personal hi-fi around its neck. Straw, tied with orange baler twine, also extrudes from this figure’s wrists and ankles. This figure has a papier-mâché head and its eyebrows are raised as it looks up at us. Its right arm is holding a freshly cut green stick, which has some leaf buds attached. A fishing line is fastened to the end of the stick and hangs down into the culvert. Three plastic fishes are attached to this line; they have red heads and white bodies. Ferns and mosses grow in the culvert. At 15.12 we notice an arrangement of stones set into the wall on the opposite side of the road. A large, irregular shaped stone is set in a niche formed into the wall, enclosed within an arch consisting of three dressed stones. Above it is a small rectangular carved stone. There are three notches or grooves cut into the rear of the irregular stone.
A sign written in Gothic script marks ST NEOT VILLAGE STORE AND POST OFFICE. There is a red post box marked GR set into the storefront. The window contains a display of craft pottery and sunflowers. The shop front is painted white with a black edge skirting at ground level. A hanging basket with red poppies and other blue flowers hangs beside a red Post Office sign. There is a house nearby with a slate nameplate reading SERENA HOUSE. Across the road many colourful floral baskets hang from the front of the London Inn. The London Inn is the only public house that lies within the sign of Leo, on its front doorway is a brass lion’s head cast in brass. Outside at the front of the inn is low walled enclosure fitted with a wooden bench and two bench seats. The enclosure is paved with irregular shaped pieces of slate. There is a blue ashtray in the centre of the bench. Beside the Inn there is a churchyard which we now enter. A stone carving of a crucifixion stands on a lichen-covered stone memorial. Two rusted iron balls rest on the base of this construction, each ball has a one-inch diameter hole drilled into its centre. A slate set into the side of the church has a skull carved at the top of it. Carved into the slate is a Latin text:
Omne Participes
Nemo praecellit nili que sequendus,
Serior patres ego sum secutas
Me secuturus meditetur unus
Qilque seqentum
Inside the church porch there is a notice board, fixed to this is a plastic-laminated sign headed GRYLLS SUNDIAL. There is a diagram of the sundial and more explanatory text. Pinned to the church door is a smaller sign, also laminated in plastic, it reads:
WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE
VICAR MUST BE OBTAINED BEFORE
ANY REPRODUCTION OR
PUBLICATION OF PHOTOGRAPHS
We wonder what this ecclesiastical authority wants to hide as we enter the church. We become aware of a plenitude of leonine imagery within. In a stained glass window, a saint holds a small winged and haloed lion. In another window a round-eared lion is shown on the deck of Noah’s Ark. In two other stained glass panels showing the life of St Neot, a golden lion’s face features on the side of fountains, spewing forth milky water. In another stained glass, Jesus and his disciples sit around a round table, of the sort more often favoured by King Arthur. At 15.36 we notice a sundial attached to the outside of the church. It is dated 1682. According to this sundial the time is now 2pm.

see alsohttp://www.nigelayers.com/zodiac/leo.html

Collateral Salvage

2011-07-24T02:02:00.000-07:00

Collateral Salvage by Nocturnal Emissions

Recorded in 2002

Glossalalia

2011-07-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

Glossalalia by Nocturnal Emissions
First released in 1994

Invocation of the Beast Gods

2011-07-14T00:42:00.001-07:00

Invocation of the Beast Gods by Nocturnal Emissions

Sunspot Activity

2011-07-10T12:42:00.001-07:00

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/album/sunspot-activity"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Sunspot Activity by Nocturnal Emissions&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;
First released in 1997.

Bodmin Moor Zodiac: Cancer the Cabilla Crab

2011-06-24T02:21:00.000-07:00

The sun is in this sign from 23 rd June to 23 rd July. A water sign.
Key words: memory, home, antiquity, food, motherhood, tides.
Light or planet: the moon.
Body parts: breasts, stomach.

Cancer is the least visible sign of the zodiac. In Greek mythology, the goddess Hecate sent the crab to kill Heracles. Hecate’s equivalent, known as Trivia in Roman mythology, was the goddess of witchcraft, the three-way crossroads, and the harvest moon. She was an underworld Titan-goddess who assisted Jove in the Titanomachy and was therefore able to keep her powers. She was a friend of Ceres and helped her find Ceres’ daughter Prosepina. As a part of her role as an underworld goddess, she was known as the Queen of Ghosts. Images of Hecate, as a liminal goddess were placed at borders as a ward against danger. The liminal state is characterised by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition, during which normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to something new. People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal. It became common to place statues of the Hecate at the gates of cities, and eventually domestic doorways. Over time, the association of keeping out evil spirits led to the belief that, if offended, Hecate would also let in evil spirits. Thus invocations to Hecate arose as the governess of the borders between the normal world and the spirit world. The hero Heracles stepped on the crab and killed it, but the goddess rewarded the boldness and devotion of the crab by placing it among the constellations. Two or three millennia ago the sun stood in Cancer on the summer solstice, after which it returned south. Cancer is an example of star motion in both directions. Alpha Cancri known as Acubens of 4.3 Magnitude is a double star, the smaller star is 1,000 times fainter than the larger star and is of 11.8 Magnitude. They are about 174 light years away. The triple star Zeta Canceri is about 83 light years away from us. Its components A and B revolve over a period of 60 years, component C revolves around them in about 1200 years. Cancer also contains the stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis which represent two donkeys, the northern and the southern.

In Spanish cabilla means treenail. A treenail (pronounced “trunnel” rhyming with “tunnel”) is a cylindrical pin of oak, or other hardwood, used to secure the planks of a wooden ship to the ribs. They were used instead of metal nails or bolts because they did not rust or loosen or because metal was not available. Also in Spanish, the word cabilla describes the masculine sexual organ. In Hebrew Cabbala, means reception, Standard Hebrew Qabbala, Tiberian Hebrew Qabbālāh; (also written variously as Cabala, Cabalah, Kabala, Kabalah, Kabbala, Kabbalah, Qabala, Qabalah) is an interpretation, exegesis, or hermeneutic key of the Torah, or the religious mystical system of. The Cabilla crab is decapod having eyes on short stalks and a broad flattened carapace with a small abdomen folded under the thorax and pincers, simultaneously it represents a crab apple on the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life is an important notion within the Kabbalah of Judaism. It was later adopted by some Christians, Hermeticists, and even some pagans and is also found in evolutionary theory. A page from Charles Darwin’s notebooks around July 1837 shows the first-known sketch by Charles Darwin of an evolutionary Tree of Life. The origin of the symbol or glyph of Cancer has been given diverse interpretations. Some sources describe it as a representation of the breasts, an area of the anatomy ruled by Cancer and which is also indicative of the inherent nurturing nature of this Sign. Other sources liken the glyph to a pair of crab claws, intertwined in such a manner as to represent the dual nature of the Cancer individual. In this latter interpretation, it is similar to the Asian symbol of the Yin and the Yang. In Vedic Astrology, this glyph signifies the Womb of Time, in which all manifestation takes place and is symbolic of the caring qualities associated with motherhood, as well as spiritual creativity.

In Egypt, Cancer was represented by two turtles known as the Stars of the Water and occasionally as an obscure aquatic creature known as Allul. Perhaps more than any other zodiac sign, Cancer is symbolic of the passive, receptive but profoundly powerful and encompassing female force in nature, the all-nourishing or all-devouring mother. Judaism is a monotheistic religion, strongly connected to a patriarchal God, Yahweh. However, a goddess was associated with Judaism from its conception, and has continued to play an important part, in various forms, to the present. The goddess is best known as Shekhina, a Talmudic term describing the manifestation of God’s presence on earth. While the name Shekhina has been erased from the Bible, she is nevertheless bound to extremely old traditions, and closely relates to ancient goddesses. Particularly significant is the Canaanite goddess Ashera or Ash Ra who, at the beginning of the Israelites’ settlement in the land of Canaan, was often referred to as Yahweh’s consort. In Kabbalistic astrology Cancer is known as Tammuz named after the Babylonian corn god. It is one of the three negative months of the year: Tevet, Tammuz and Av. In Tammuz the walls around Jerusalem were penetrated. The Kabbalah teaches that the course of history transpires from the cyclical energy processes of the year rather than because of physical events. Therefore, by looking at the time at which each moment in history occurs, we can better understand why it happened. Each planet controls two signs, except for the sun, which controls only Leo (Av) and the moon, which controls only Cancer (Tammuz). Because the sun and the moon control one sign each, an unbalanced situation is created in each of these months. This imbalance causes the crab, the symbol for the month of Tammuz, to walk sideways rather than forward and backward. This could explain the many deviations that have occurred during our ritual walks in the sign of the crab.

Cancer is the only astrological sign named after a disease. Nearly all cancers are caused by abnormalities in the genetic material of the transformed cells. These abnormalities may be due to the effects of carcinogens, such as tobacco smoke, chemicals, infectious agents, or radiation. Many modern astrologers consider it significant that the first atomic bomb was detonated when Saturn reached the longitude of 20 degrees Cancer. Cancer-promoting genetic abnormalities may also be randomly acquired through errors in DNA replication, or are inherited, and thus present in all cells from birth. Complex interactions between carcinogens and the host genome may explain why only some develop cancer after exposure to a known carcinogen. New aspects of the genetics of cancer pathogenesis, such as DNA methylation, and micro-RNAs are increasingly being recognised as important. Under the tropical zodiac, Cancer is occupied by the sun from June 21 st to July 22 nd and under the sidereal zodiac, it is currently from July 21 st to August 9 th. The sign opposite to Cancer is Capricorn.

Piecing a ritual walk together from the remnants of the Cabilla crab, through gorse bushes and stone tracks, is like retrieving a false memory, the visual evidence for truths we prefer to forget. The crab defines the limits of the imagination of Mesolithic Cornwall, to try and get a sense of the original shape by tapping its ruins, following our designated route, is futile. We are contradicted, misinformed, fenced out for every inch of the journey. But the perversity of that desire, to pick up on the energy field, is a strong as ever.

Earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris)

2011-06-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

<a href="http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/album/holy-of-holies-volume-two">Holy of Holies VOLUME TWO by Nocturnal Emissions</a>

Beware of the Trolls

2011-06-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

It has been brought to my attention that I'm currently being trolled by some imposter in one or two newsgroups because of my opposition to pro-fascist & pro-paedo propagandists on the goth scene.. (and pretty much anywhere else come to think of it).

For your information, I don't use a Hotmail account and my web site isn't a page on Wikipedia.

You can find the real Nigel Ayers on this blog right here, or on the links up on the side of this page.

By the way
love music hate racism

and who makes the nazis

Holy of Holies VOLUME ONE by Nocturnal Emissions

2011-06-04T11:07:00.001-07:00

<a href="http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/album/holy-of-holies-volume-one">Holy of Holies VOLUME ONE by Nocturnal Emissions</a>

Garden Chafer (Phyllopertha horticola)

2011-05-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

Gemini, the Temple twins

2011-05-24T02:59:00.000-07:00

The sun is in this sign from 22^nd May to 22^nd June. An air sign.
Key words: letters, books, stories, reports, radio, telephone, roads, railways, twins, dexterity, handicrafts.
Light or planet: Mercury.
Body parts: lungs, arms.

According to legend, Castor was mortal while Pollux was immortal. When Castor died, Pollux did not want to live with the gods alone, so both brothers now travel alternately between Olympus and Hades, between the Holy Mountain and the Otherworld.

Named stars in the Gemini constellation are Althena, Castor A, Castor B, Mebsuta, Pollux, Mekbuda, Wasat, Tejat Posterior and Tejat Prior. The brightest star is not Alpha Geminorum, but Beta Geminorum, also known as Pollux. It is a 1.2 Magnitude orange giant of spectral class KO and is 34 light years away from earth. Alpha Geminorum also known as Castor is fainter at 1.6 Magnitude and is 52 light years away. Castor is a multiple star. Gemini is a complex sextuple system: the visible stars A, B and C are spectroscopic binaries, betrayed by double lines in their spectra. Within a 0.5 circle of the 5.5 Magnitude open star cluster M35 – NGC 2168 it is possible to see some 200 stars, the brightest being 8.0 Magnitude. The cluster is about 2800 light years away. NGC 2392 is known as the Eskimo Nebula or Clown Face. It is a 8.9 Magnitude bright planetary nebula and its distance is estimated at 14000 to 3600 light years away.

In the Bodmin Moor Terrestrial Zodiac, the sign of Gemini lies over the area known as Temple and Cardinham Moor. Parts of the sign are marked on the Ordnance Survey map as a Danger Area. We were at first wary of exploring this area, was it a fenced off military zone that we would be unable to explore? Would we have to walk the perimeter of the Danger Area? The image of the twins is a triumph of imaginative omission, for it is the minds eye that completes the design. The landscape lines that define them curve and melt into the greens and browns of fields, quarries and clay tips. The outline is close to something half-glimpsed or apprehended in the dark of a dream. Do the twins share one body, but two heads? Are they Siamese twins?

In our enhanced visualisation the twins wear red and blue loin-cloths respectively. Both brothers are seated. The twin in the blue has an outstretched hand in which he hold a gold coloured bow and arrow. One leans slightly on his brother and carries a golden harp with four strings. This twin’s head partly obscures the first twin’s head from view. One of his arms embraces his brother and we see his fingers on the other twin’s bare waist. In his other hand he carries a wooden club, the club extends the length of the twin’s hip to shoulder, it is approximately the same shape and covers part of the Danger Area on the Ordnance Survey map though it is smaller and is set at a slightly different angle. The constellation of Gemini is roughly rectangular in shape, however the rectangle is slightly twisted being formed by the conjunction of eight stars. The twins are seated on a red line which runs diagonally beneath them. The red line represents both the Milky Way and the A30. The bow and arrows lie over the hamlet of Temple, the club lies over the Danger Area, its tip is marked by Great Care Hill. The twins’ feet lie on Trehudreh Downs and their heads lie on Hardhead Downs.

Taurus, the bull of Stripple Stones

2011-05-02T02:08:00.000-07:00

Scorpio, the scorpion of Pensilva

2011-04-29T02:33:00.000-07:00

Virgo, the virgin of Dobwalls

2011-04-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

TRAX XTRA - FREE REPRINT!

2011-04-24T03:13:00.000-07:00

What did you find in your Easter Egg? If the surprise disappointed you, don't be upset, we offer you the free reprint curated by Radical Matters - Editions / Label of the historical album TRAX 0982 XTRA, ideated in 1982 by TRAX Unit 01 Piermario Ciani and composed at distance in a network of crossed exchanges by ten international musicians. As a bonus, you will find also a new experiment in "telecomposed" music, TRAX NEWXTRA 2011, coordinated by Gianluca Becuzzi with contributions from Nigel Ayers, Simon Balestrazzi, Fabio Orsi, Pietro Riparbelli and Rod Summers with Marie-Claire Krell.

Get it as a FREE DOWNLOAD, inclusive of cover images and bonus contents, here:
http://www.radicalmatters.com/asp/web_editions.asp

Or buy it as a COLLECTABLE LIMITED EDITION CD in special 7” sleeve with inserts (Euro 15,00) here:

http://www.radicalmatters.com/asp/cd_cdr_catalogue.asp

Read below in this message the new introductory text and the list of tracks.

HAPPY EASTER!

Vittore Baroni & Radical Matters

TRAX 0982 XTRA

One year after the reprint as a free download and limited edition cd of the Trax 0983 Anthems project, Radical Matters reproposes with the same formula the first vinyl album produced by the atypical group/label TRAX in the distant year 1982. Following up a series of audiocassettes assembled with similar methodologies (Technodeath, Horrorbox, The Cop Killers, etc.), this pioneering album conceived and coordinated by Piermario Ciani synthesized brilliantly the idea of a “telematic” (and “modular”) music, composed and played through collaborations at distance, a concept explored before the age of Internet both by activists of the heterogeneous international “tape network” and by exponents of the “serious” electronic music scene, for example Pietro Grossi. As usual in this series of reprints started in 2007 with the double cd Rednight, Gianluca Becuzzi took care of the remastering from the original vinyl and added a new experiment in composition at distance (NewXtra). Nigel Ayers is the only participant of Xtra that has been involved again, creating thirty years later an ideal bridge between the two projects. For the occasion, I immersed myself once again in the archive of memories, digging up some images and documents of the period (the Grand Trax 0184 box, in particular, contained some graphics originally created for a deluxe edition of the Xtra lp, never completed), added here as an extra bonus and testimony of the multimedial disposition of the whirl of products and events that TRAX got under way between 1981 and 1987.

Whatever happened to the original TRAX Units? Some friends (to whom this reprint is dedicated) have sadly come to an untimely end, others are still active in areas connected to the artistical and musical scene, even with high-profile results (like Massimo Giacon in the fields of design, comics and contemporary art, or Martin Hall, who has become in Denmark a cult writer and composer), yet others are today professors of high repute or hold public offices in the cultural sector (Martina, Ciullini). If you appreciated the unique mixture of bizarre new wave, darting elettropop, ferocious industrial-noise and minimalist ambient of Xtra, let us know, we will feel more motivated to retrieve a few other rare relics. Once more, my warmest thanks go to all the authors involved and to Gianluca Becuzzi and Sandro Gronchi, without whose genuine enthusiasm this work would have never seen the light of day.

Vittore Baroni, January 2011 - vittorebaroni@alice.it

This record has not been produced, as usually, by one or more bands going into a recording studio with some compositions ready to be performed and later transferred onto vinyl.

This record is the final result of a process that did not take into account the musical, stylistic or compositive necessities of the various participants.

The Central Unit 01 contacted a selected number of individuals acting as Peripheral Units in a project of crossed interferences.

Some Peripheral Units prepared a base-track on tape that was forwarded by 01 to other Units for further elaboration.

The graphic scheme on the cover represents the development of the subsequent crossings: e.g. the track Gamma Thetan, that opens the TRAX side of the record, is the mix that results from a sound base produced by Unit 04, forwarded to Unit 08 who elaborated it and then forwarded it to 02, who after working on it returned the tape to 01, functioning as the data processing centre.

The project Trax 0982 Xtra proposes a workable model but does not exhaust its possibilities.

The series of ten modular compositions on this LP is just one among many possible combinations.

Trax 0982 Xtra presents audio pieces without a composer performed by inexistent ensembles that met only through a network of reproduction technologies and communication media.

(original cover notes)

The conceptual and operative scheme that I devised for Trax NewXtra, the new project of “modular composition” with the participation of six Units, four Italians and two from other countries, is a little different from the original one. Instead of adopting the scheme of crossed collaborations employed in 1982, I opted for a radial system. Acting as Central Unit, I provided the five Peripheral Units invited to the project (Ayers, Balestrazzi, Orsi, Riparbelli, Summers) with the same audio input, a series of dronic bases. I asked to each Unit to record a different track for each base I provided, not overmixed but as a separate track. In this way, once all the contributions had been collected, I was able to freely recombine all the different pieces of the audio puzzle into a single suite, titled Where Angels Can't Land. Of particular interest is the fact that, with this scheme, we gave form to a sort of “deaf orchestra” in which all the musicians played together without hearing each other. Only the coordinator/director of the orchestra or Central Unit (me) has been able to hear and (partially) control the global sound of the ensemble. In this sense, the radial structure of NewXtra works exactly in the opposite way compared to the old Xtra, where each Unit answered to the audio input provided by the preceding Unit in a chain of vertical stratifications. If you wish, NewXtra also represents a sort of semi-controlled application of the aleatory theories of John Cage.

Gianluca Becuzzi, January 2011

TRAX 0982 XTRA

TRAX side:

1 - Gamma Thetan (01<02<08<04)

2 - Strange Quack Quack (01<03<10)

3 - Di lui non si sa più nulla (01<03<07)

4 - Nastro rosso (01<03<06)

5 - Fishes (01<09<08)

XTRA side:

6 - Combination (01<04<03)

7 - Ancora icone (01<09<08)

8 - Fanfare for the Meat Generation (01<07<04)

9 - Live Blister Bump (01<02<07<09)

10 - I Love Cancer (01<10<06<04)

Central Unit:

01 - Piermario Ciani: concept, organization & mix.

Peripheral Units:

02 - Vittore Baroni: text, voice, guitar, post office.

03 - Massimo Giacon: text, voice, noises, casiotone. With Spirocheta Pergoli: Fabio Beltrame (sax, bass), Enrico Friso (keyboards), Alberto Mineo (bass, guitar, guitar synth).

04 - Giancarlo Martina: guitar. With B.Sides: Bruce (vocals), Gian (drums), Spyke (keyboards), Momi (drums, base only).

05 - Martin Hall: tapes, noises (base only).

06 - Enrico Piva: tapes, keyboards, personal IBM.

07 - Nocturnal Emissions: Nigel Ayers (tapes, voice, violin), Caroline K (synth, voice).

08 - Daniele Ciullini: synth.

09 - De Rezke: Angelo Pretolani (text, voice, rhythmbox, casiotone), Roberto Rossini (synth, voice, casiotone), Marco Canepa (synth, sequencer).

10 - Ado Scaini: rhythmbox, synth (base only). With Ale (keyboards, base only), Plexy (synth, sequencer, base only), W. Gibson (bass, guitar), Radar (drums), Silence (bass), Blue Panther (maracas), Frankie Gasperoni (geometer).

Tracks 1-10 released by TRAX in September 1982 as a black vinyl LP in edtion of 1000 copies.

Original cover art: Piermario Ciani & Cristina.

Thanks to Studio Diamine, Rap & Momi, Atelier De Montage, 001... Cancer, Centro UH!

In affectionate memory of Piermario, Caroline K and Enrico Piva.

(bonus) TRAX NEWXTRA 2011

11 - Gianluca Becuzzi / VV.AA. - Where Angels Can't Land (25’ 18”)

Central Unit:

Gianluca Becuzzi: electroacoustic drones, sound objects, programming.

Peripheral Units:

Nigel Ayers - Nocturnal Emissions: handcrafted digital audio, Made in Cornwall.

Simon Balestrazzi: prepared ukelin and tsymbaly, bird calls, analogue synths.

Fabio Orsi: processed electric guitar.

Pietro Riparbelli: transcoded short wave radio.

Rod Summers/VEC Audio: vocals, vocal treatments, with Marie-Claire Krell (vocals).

Track 11 assembled and produced by Gianluca Becuzzi at Kinetixlab (2011).

TRAX 0982 XTRA - Reprint remastered for Radical Matters / Editions / Label by Gianluca Becuzzi in January 2011 at Kinetixlab (Italy).

All (c) remain to the authors. Edition designed and manufactured by RM-ED/L | SG

License: C.C. by-nc-nd 2011 | Radical Matters - Editions / Label

(from Vittore Baroni)

Slow Worms (Anguis fragilis)

2011-04-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

The cats brought these two beauties in today.

Mantrachanter with Bird Song and Traffic Noise

2011-04-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

The Mantrachanter interacts with live bird song and traffic noise.

Mantrachanter

2011-04-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

An electronic device specially built to chant the first words of Space Cornish.
Work in progress.

Mouth of Babes - new download version

2011-03-31T06:56:00.000-07:00

Mouth of Babes by Nocturnal Emissions
Recorded between Spring 1989 and Summer 1990. All the vocal parts on this recording are performed by singers under the age of 18 months.

Brainwashed Interview with Justin Patrick

2011-03-31T02:50:00.000-07:00

Nigel Ayers has long been an agent provocateur in the realm of experimental music. In the late 1970s he formed a group called The Pump with his brother Daniel Ayers and the late Caroline K. After a string of cassette releases a new project was formed by Nigel. Since 1981 Nocturnal Emissions has been releasing a steady stream of deconstructed music. The broad range of styles he has delved into can be bewildering. There are those made from abrasive noise, to an album made up of entirely remixed bagpipes, to another utilizing recordings made with vocal sounds from children under the age of 18 months, to another that samples cell phone conversations picked up on a police scanner, and a whole slew of titles which could be considered drone music before that kind of thing was as popular. He has also delved into electro and teeth-gnashing techno, and recently a dub album. And those are just the musical expressions of his curiosity. Nigel is a writer, poet, creator of viral art and digital ritual. He was kind enough to take the time and do an email interview with me to talk about his various explorations.

Justin Patrick : The phrases "Duty Experiment," "Guerilla Ontology," "Boycott Consensus Reality," and "Neo-Tantric" turn up frequently in association with your artistic work. What do these tag lines mean to you and how do they relate to what you do as an artist?

Nigel : For quite a few years, although I had a degree in visual art, I tried to avoid calling myself an artist. That's because I found the term to be very politically loaded, as the development of the idea of the artist had implications that were central to a class-based society. For a few years I preferred to call myself something like a "cultural worker." I felt I always benefited from my fine art background as the British art schools were, at the time I went through them in the mid-'70s, very good at sharpening your critical perception, especially self-criticism which can for some be creatively crippling. They made you creative, very tolerant of uncertainty, and very flexible. I think that nowadays they retain many of these qualities, but since the "Brit Art" phenomenon of the '90s, art has become more of a "career option" when you have aspirations of being a Damien Hirst, and a head full of corporate X-Factor bullshit.

Anyway, I think actually it was before the rise of Hirst, I thought it might be an idea to reclaim the craft of "the artist." And anyway I don't think what I do is anything else. And there are positive sides to the idea of being an artist, it's a small piece of freedom in a repressive culture. So as an artist, I feel that I am working with the field of information. About how we see and experience our exterior and interior "realities." I have a tendency to seeing art more as a hammer-like more than a mirror-like tool, that is in using art, you are changing reality ..and society.. just a little bit.

Using memorable bite-sized phrases, slogans and tag lines in my work is a form of poetry I've explored. As an artist you create the frame around your work and this includes the labels that might be stuck on the wall around it. Critical writing, interviews, and other published texts are opportunities for word play, in creating personas, they are part of the work and help create its social meaning. I use a variant form of "Guerrilla Ontology" which is "Guerrilla Sign Ontology." Cryptic crossword lovers will notice this phrase contains the words "Sign- On," which is what you have to do to get Unemployment Benefit in the UK. Developing my art in Thatcher's Britain, Unemployment Benefit was very very useful. "Duty Experiment" is a phrase borrowed from a bundle of photocopied documents I salvaged from the skip/dumpster when I worked as a cleaner in the India High Commission. (I could say it was something I found when I worked in India, as India House, being the embassy, is legally part of India although it's in London).

This was a piece of "outsider art" sent in by an apparently psychotic member of the public. I recycled parts of the text in early NE work "Tissue of Lies," as well as in The Pump project. "Boycott Consensus Reality" is an appropriate, precise, and polite response to the colonization of our everyday dream worlds by totalitarian corporations and their pernicious advertising. "Neo-tantric," that's one I've sort of dropped a bit, because it got taken up by a well-known religious cult. What I was looking at was integrating rational humanism within animism, the idea is an ecological thing developed from surrealism, and nothing whatever to do with how Sting has sex.

JP : You are perhaps best known for your musical activities under the moniker of Nocturnal Emissions, yet you continue to remain active in other media. Your "War Criminal" images of Tony Blair and George W. Bush have spread around the globe. You have released a book of spam poetry, The Control You Gain, The Power You Use, and a book documenting your psychogeographic explorations of the Bodmin Moor in your home of Cornwall, along with a few other books. You work with video, put together installations, and have been making electronic gadgets. How do all of these different modes of operation relate to each other?

Nigel : I think they all address the idea of being a multi-dimensional person, and that multi-dimensional personality being shaped by social forces, as well as helping to shape those forces back, as a tool-maker. I like to get away from the bourgeois idea of being an author, and become more of a medium for exploring, focusing and sharing existing memes. Maybe I can put a new twist on them or distort and degrade and mutate information, and subject it to critical inspection but the pleasure is in bouncing that material back and forth into the world. It’s a kind of information-dance.

JP : Is there an area of focus you'd like to spend more time exploring?

Nigel : I prefer to be a non-specialist.

JP : You've made a number of books available through Print-On-Demand services. One is a roundup of the Network News, featuring many authors, which you distributed between 1990 and 1999. Another that you edited is A Dictionary of Space Cornish. This came out in conjunction with the Cornwall Community Space Program to document the language for space that they developed. How did you become involved in this project that took the Cornish language and adjusted it to make it more suitable for space travel?

Nigel : A Dictionary of Space Cornish came about through my involvement with the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, which was an international network of activists committed to resisting gravity, and evolved from group discussions.

JP : Much of your work has been inspired by the landscapes of your home in Cornwall. You've created a body of work that I see as being a reciprocal feedback loop with the environment. Now you are colonizing Google maps by embedding your videos and music into the application . Science fiction author Rudy Rucker has been using the street view on Google maps as a way to go to a place without actually visiting it, so he can then write about that location. Do you have any other creative uses for Google maps or similar programs planned? What can you envisage other artists using these interactive map spaces for in the future?

Nigel : That thing about feedback loops is interesting on my mind. I think our memories are shaped by media systems, it's the way we share our inner landscape. I think it's important to tap into these global systems, which somehow form our collective memory. It seems, from what I've read about mnemonics, that location-based systems are particularly memorable.

Also, apparently a larger percentage of people believe in astrology than any of the major world religions. I'm not sure that my art practice colonizes these mnemonic spaces, rather that it takes up a kind of viral residence in shared public space. My art practice has something to do with recapturing the imagination. I think the imagination is colonized by meanings attached to flags and logos. Mass murder isn’t mass murder if it’s wrapped in a flag–if we don’t take charge of symbols, then symbols and the emotions attached to them will take charge of us. By the way, if anyone is colonizing public space, it's not me, it's Google. Google extends private property into public space, each screen shot has this corporate image encoded within in. I’m trying to do something very personal and basic, reclaim my own personal space. But also I’m encoding in the videos a scrambling of memory–modern urban planners are latter-day druids, reshaping the landscape in the shape of their own gods and goddesses. I think these kind of viral art campaigns are a way of reclaiming space for the imagination, and to restore a bit of sanity and sense of community. I think there is a basic anger in my work, an anger at the human race and the natural world being plundered by corporate greed. You have to wonder what the concept of “freedom” means, is it the psychotic response of the supporters of huge armies in the world, protecting the interests of the super-rich against the super-poor. One thing I’ve been very interested in is the retelling of recent myths and using magical practice similar to that used by alchemists like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, turning worthless trash into valuable cash. Except that I’m not impressed by the way they were such suckers for class-based society, and the way they re-inforced the status quo.

I think that Google’s street view is a wonderful technology and one that is too good to be left in the hands of a capitalist corporation. I’d like to see the evolution of open source, Wiki-versions of street view. There is the Open Street Map project, I met a couple of the people who got that going and that’s where I first got the idea of using GPS in a magical ritual. I find Google Street view fascinating, I like the bits that don’t join together properly, the shifts in time between when different parts of a street have been scanned.

When I was walking the lines I plotted on the Bodmin Moor Zodiac, I used large scale (UK military Government) Ordnance Survey Maps as well as photos taken from airplanes and satellites from Microsoft’s mapping project. The Google views weren’t detailed enough for my use in 2006. There are many discrepancies between official maps and the publicly available aerial photos, which is odd because the OS maps were partly based on aerial photos, and there is a small airport actually within the zodiac. While I was walking the Bodmin Moor zodiac there were major road works underway in the southern section, where the Virgo image lies. I have photos of the surveying equipment used to mark out the road when they were building it, painted wooden artifacts not dissimilar to items used in ritual magic by the OTO. What I found later was that rather than breaking up the landscape giant overlay, the new road builders had in fact made new marks where marks weren’t so visible previously. I can’t say I’ve read much Rudy Rucker, but yes, Google Maps is good a way of viewing places for research purposes if you want to hack out a novel. I used Street View when I made My Own Stonehenge , to correct some the inaccuracies of the plastic model kit it was based on. But street view isn’t all that accurate either, I had to use some archeological plans that I found elsewhere. There is a time element in Google maps, and overlaying the Google views on other mapping systems, say Microsoft’ views, gets interesting. Also integrating this into a form of magical realism.

JP : I have heard from a reputable source that one of your favorite writers is the Irish novelist Flann O'Brien. What is it that attracts you to his work? Have his writings influenced your own work? If so, in what ways?

Nigel : I like Flann O'Brien a lot. (which reminds me, the guy I lent At Swim to didn't like it and hasn't returned it, I'll have to buy myself another copy!). He was writing in Ireland in the 1930s. It's the deep absurdity in the way he mashes up the tropes of various genres with shaggy dog stories and unreliable narrators. He deconstructs the novel in the way a postmodern writer is supposed to—you've got Joyce and Beckett in there—and Flann is a lot funnier. Yes Flann O'Brien has definitely influenced my work, especially books like the Bodmin Moor Zodiac, and the fictional sections of Network News.

JP : You recently told me that a local radio station contacted you about a motor accident on the highway near the Virgins Nipple in Cornwall. On your blog you wrote that " The Virgin's Nipple is a ritual motor vehicle trackway designed to stimulate an erogenous zone within the Giant Effigy of Virgo in the Bodmin Moor Terrestrial Zodiac ." Did they ask you to comment on the event? Do you feel there is a corresponding connection between events in the area, your ritual walks and your other artistic engagements with the landscape?

Nigel : The reporter is coming round to see me tomorrow, I'll let you know. [Link to audio file of Nigel speaking on the radio show can be found here ]. I think our understanding of landscape is a bunch of (often media-fueled) ideas about place, private and public property and belonging-to-a-place, from which we get the construction of personal identity. Locality, ethnicity, nationality, family, tribe, gender, age, subculture, and species are all negotiable when you get into the zeroes and ones of informational-based systems. Reality is, in this sense, a social construction and informational based artworks are part of that construction. Human consciousness doesn't stand aside and look at reality, it is part of reality. There is no such thing as art, apart from within a negotiated social construction. And one of the things I like to use art to do, is to make it not look like art a lot of the time, so that you are forced to think about it a bit more. Although it's nice to imagine that my ritual walks have activated some sort of magical current in the landscape, I am perhaps too rationally-minded to be totally convinced. I'm more closely inclined to Dawkins' theory of the spread of memes. That is, the information generated mutates as it gets into the public domain, attaching itself to various hosts. My artworks have now been in the public domain for an amount of time sufficient for them to start to interfere with the social construction of place, in that they are beginning to be used by public services like traffic services, in this example.

The Twelve Woods roundabout would otherwise be a particularly meaningless public space, the highways agencies have resisted attempts by the local community to give it visual meaning with Christmas trees. It was ripe for eroticizing with multiple levels of meaning, if only via virtual and digital media. The new cheeky name for the roundabout seems to have done the trick.

JP : On one of your websites you have a page devoted to "Desiring Machines" you have built. They are very beautiful pieces of psychotronic craftsmanship. Can you tell me about your intentions behind building them, their use in your installations, and what recordings, if any, they turn up on?

Nigel : They are healing machines for hands-on use. They are based on some of the principles of radionics, except where radionic devices tend to use pseudo-electronics, I have used real electronics. They are packed with sensors, and because my approach to electronic engineering is improvisatory and intuitive, they tend to be short-circuited, over-sensitive and chaotic to the extent that that they respond to to the extra sensory perception of their users. I haven't as yet used them on any of my recordings.

JP : You often use the language of magick to describe what you’re doing and yet you are a skeptic of magick. How do you view such belief systems and how do you play with belief systems—your own and other peoples?

Nigel : Yes. This may have derived from my attempts to talk about art to art teachers. I remain even more profoundly skeptical of artspeak! Zappa said something like writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I guess that in using the snake oil terminologies of magick, I'm using a language which is partially understood by a lot of people who might partially understand the language of art, but respond better to subcultural references. Modernist art (including post-modern art) is a project of developing new languages, to describe new experiences, and is very much built on misunderstanding, and re-interpreting the past. Traditional societies don't need traditional art being explained to them. And to paraphrase Cage, you don't have to call it art if the term bothers you.

So, although I am hyper rational in my daily life, and really have to say I don't share the superstitions that the industrial music world is riddled with (which I put down to its prime movers attending English private schools that were a bit like Hogwarts). What I'm doing in my practice is exploring dream worlds, which could be the positive side of voluntarily induced psychosis, while keeping both feet firmly in the clouds. Where what I'm working with is a magical reality, the one which the mass media and politicians mess with in their satanic way. Having said that, I think my hyper rationality is close to animism where everything is holy and close to paganism, because it’s to do with a reverence and integration with the natural world—though I do use soap and genetically modified ingredients. Philosophically, this may be close to existentialism but different from individualistic magic.

JP : "Nocturnal Emissions" is a provocative name for you music project. How did you decide on it?

Nigel : It just came to me one night ;-)

JP : Have any of your works been inspired by dreams?

Nigel : Yes, quite a few of them. Mostly they are inspired by bees in my bonnet.

JP : What are your thoughts on Beuys and Duchamp?

Nigel : So when I mentioned using dreams, Freud claimed that dreams were to do with the subconscious urges that were unacceptable and otherwise inaccessible to the conscious mind and that these unfulfilled wishes were expressed symbolically in a personal language that was meaningless to anyone but a trained psychoanalyst. My own tendency is towards a more Cognitive explanation of dreams, which is less mysterious and suggest that dreams are the brain’s way of processing and filing data, imposing some sort of order on the chaos of cognitive stimuli experienced during the day, preparing it for storage in long-term memory systems. That is, dreams are very much to do with the dreamer’s current conscious needs and preoccupations. They are not considered to be mysterious or secret symbols from a hidden impulse-driven and inaccessible realm. Some therapists argue that when a waking person relates the content of a dream he or she will necessarily impose a structure onto the dream that will include the same cognitive distortions that he or she may use to interpret other aspects of experience. So this can be a way of understanding in greater depth the cognitive distortions a client experiences. So in the respect that I’m using my music and art as a “righter of wrongs,” I’m not dealing with mysterious realms, I’m using dreams as raw material to process the very real cognitive distortions of the real world.

On to Duchamp and Beuys—apart from their life work in creating a personal mythology and celebrity for themselves, one of the things they did was point out, in Duchamp’s case—that art was anything that art professionals said was art and in Beuys’ case that everyone is an artist. That is, artists don’t necessarily have to be professionals and that other social interactions can be seen as art. This poses the question of not whether something is art or not, but whether what the art produced is good or bad, in a social sense.

I got into a debate recently with a record distributor, who I know has progressive attitudes in his personal life, but who chooses to distribute records by various “mysterious” pro-fascist bands on the goth scene. The argument he gave me was “freedom of speech,” also he wasn’t convinced that the bands in question were pro-fascist even though what they produced looked and sounded like fascist propaganda and had members who had actively raised funds for at least one racist organization, etc etc. Now, as I understand it the argument for “freedom of speech” is that you allow others to speak, not that you actively encourage them and spread their poison. And that you oppose their arguments with better ones. (I understand that pro-democratic publishers in the 1930 and '40s published Hitler’s Mein Kampf in English, with a view to exposing it to ridicule and criticism). This doesn’t seem to be what is happening in this case. So, despite this distributor's “liberal” attitudes, what this guy is doing is exploitative, and he is contributing to a particular social problem by circulating fascist propaganda. He is happy to cash in on the fools who buy this material and this argument makes sense in free market capitalism, where if you weren’t selling hi-tech weapons and instruments of torture to certain tin pot dictators, someone else would.

Incidentally, when I mentioned psychosis before, I was referring to psychosis as a metaphor, rather than extolling the “raw primitive urges of the psycho-killer,” which I think was, and continues to be, a problem with much of the Industrial scene. The author Colin Wilson–especially in his take on Freudian psychology and Nietzsche—is one of the worst culprits in creating this mythology of the “outsider” figure being somehow purer in his “extremism” than an ordinary person. Of course this kind of serial killer nonsense was taken up by P-Orridge and those silly power electronics and England’s Secret Reverse people, which produced various hyper-conformist cults of fan-boys in awe of their wonderful role models, who in turn showered them with overpriced, samey, shoddily produced, ill-thought out, crap. P-Orridge was lucky in finding a collaborator like “Sleazy” Christopherson who was skilled in creating cultish prog rock packaging, and a few decent collaborators, but Throbbing Gristle and PTV didn’t half release some crap. Hours and hours of tedious rubbish. I think there is the same problem with Merzbow, obviously as an artist (in the abstract expressionist tradition) he has to produce an amount of material to create a market, which will sustain him professionally. But the product is, at best, not very good, at worst, exploitative crap. It only makes sense if you see Merzbow as a celebrity and buy into the micro-celebrity culture that these guys depend upon.

JP : How do you feel about having been frequently lumped in (perhaps through associations from your early label Sterile Records and some of Nocturnal Emissions earliest releases) to the milieu surrounding what is sometimes called Industrial? I don't think of your music as Industrial at all, but rather partaking of the multiple avenues available in the vast landscape that pertains to recorded electronic music.

Nigel : I don't really like it, so thanks for not thinking that way!

JP : I've never felt you were someone who was trying to pass themselves off as a micro-celebrity, only as someone who is doing interesting and important work. So how do you personally sustain yourself in this late-capitalist, or as some would say too-late capitalist market?

Nigel : At the moment I have another job that allows me flexible time and doesn't drain my brain too much. The work I'm producing, which I publish myself, is closer to my intentions.

JP : From your perspective, what strategies exist for those who wish to make a living from their music, art, writings etc. without compromising their values, or a political stance that is at odds with the free market?

Nigel : I've found that when you're making a living from music, art, writings there's always an element of compromise and you're always operating with one eye on the market. I've found that not being dependent on my music, art etc for an income helps.

JP : Earlier when we were talking about magick, you mentioned that you are "even more profoundly skeptical about art speak." What is it about the language employed by artists, art teachers, and critics that arouses your already healthy skepticism?

Nigel : To clarify, it's necessary to use a certain amount of technical language to talk about the craft side of art, movement in art and art history. But I've found a lot of the "theory" attached to art is only used because it sounds "cool" and educated. When a lot of the time, to be fair, it's people who have a high visual awareness who are incapable of using written language. But also within art education there is a tendency to impose an agenda of class-divisions within the appreciation of visual and other culture. That is middle class standards are operating as a sub-text..and deference to celebrity culture.The value of an arts education is in sharpening up critical thinking..

JP : So Nigel, are there any new releases, performances, from you people should be looking out for or any other activities people should be aware of?

Nigel : There's the band camp releases . & re-issue of The Quickening CD out now.

ciao

http://www.brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8688:nigel-ayers-viral-emissions&catid=74:interviews&Itemid=91

Practical Time Travel - new download version

2011-03-23T09:27:00.001-07:00

Reliquary - new download version

2011-03-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

Multiple format downloads... first released in 1992..

Drowning in a Sea of Bliss - new download version

2011-03-04T09:01:00.001-08:00

With multiple-format downloads, improved graphics and a few minor adjustments.
Noisy techno recorded in 1982, when not everyone was into that New Romantic thing.

Stoneface - new download version

2011-03-03T11:22:00.001-08:00

With improved graphics and multiple-format downloads.

Spiritflesh - new download version

2011-03-03T10:51:00.000-08:00

With improved graphics and multiple-format downloads.

Magnetized Light - new download version

2011-03-02T10:25:00.001-08:00

With corrected track titles, improved graphics and multiple-format downloads.

Cathedral - new download version

2011-03-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

With improved graphics and multiple-format downloads.

The World is my Womb - new download version

2011-03-02T10:18:00.000-08:00

With improved graphics and multiple-format downloads.

The Virgin's Nipple

2011-02-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

The Virgin's Nipple on BBC Radio Cornwall 27 January 2011

(in case you missed it)

The Virgin's Nipple

The Virgin of Dobwall's right nipple is postitioned in the Twelvewoods roundabout

The Highways Agency is keeping very quiet about an alternative name for the big roundabout on the A38 Dobwalls bypass.

This may well be because the rather rude nickname, refers to part of an innocent woman's upper body.

The Virgin's Nipple originated from a book written by local author, Nigel Ayers, about Bodmin Zodiac signs.

Nigel created these signs on the moor and at the bottom of the circle is Virgo, the Virgin of Dobwall's.

The Highway's Agency then came along and built the bypass and the roundabout near Dobwalls.

Nigel says there is only one name the roundabout can really be given.

The rather unglamorous Twelvewoods roundabout

"What I had found was they had put the Twelvewoods roundabout right in the position of the right nipple of this goddess which I had sketched out on the landscape."

The Bodmin Moor Zodiac is the largest piece of land art ever constructed in the UK.

"There are lots of places around which have got some quite rude names, I mean look at Brown Willy, and these places have managed to stay with these names, so I don't know why they can't keep The Virgin's Nipple if it's going to catch on."

BBC Radio Cornwall's Michael Taylor reported from the roundabout on the A38 at Dobwalls.

The Highways Agency were given plenty of opportunity to comment, but BBC Radio Cornwall has heard nothing from them.

There now appears to be some confusion about which name the roundabout should take.

Up in Bristol it was a normal day in the office of Trafficlink which provides traffic information to the BBC.

That was until the police rang in to report an accident on the Twelvewoods roundabout on the A38 at Dobwalls.

Nigel Ayer's Bodmin Moor Terrestrial Zodiac

Dan O'Hare from Trafficlink, needing to pinpoint the exact location of the accident, went onto the internet to do some research.

"I went onto the internet to do a quick search to find some more local information and the Twelvewoods roundabout came up with The Virgin's Nipple before it".

The use of the name Virgin's Nipple has also been used on the Highways Agency's very own radio station.

Local Councillor Peter Scott thinks the whole thing is hilarious: "As it stands I think it's quite appropriate, virgin's nipple, untouched by man, that's quite appropriate for the roundabout, which is quite baron in itself and never looks as though anyone has ever done anything to it."

Since the roundabout was constructed the Highways Agency has resisted calls from people in Dobwalls to put something on it to brighten it up a bit.

Suggestions included a large chunk of Cornish granite and a giant pasty but the agency said a very firm "no" because it doesn't want anything on here which might distract drivers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/cornwall/hi/people_and_places/newsid_9377000/9377844.stm

Glynn Valley Observatory: Sacred Alignments

2011-01-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

Between Great Care Hill and the lake, a flight of 34 concrete steps runs up the side of a clay tip. We descend Great Care Hill and ascend the steps up the lakeside clay tip. At the top of the tip stands a rectangular steel frame about 8 feet high. This has practical benefits: it frames what we record. It forms a painting of a landscape seen from a window in which the window is in the landscape. From one side we see Great Care Hill, from the other the white clay tips. This frame creates a doorway whose orientation establishes ancestral connections that link the industrial world of the clay tips with the cosmologies and mythologies of distant rock outcrops and cairns. Framing the external world in two directions, the physical and cultural meanings of the steel frame have a mythopoetic significance, reproducing permanent relationships between the living, the ancestors and the spirit world in a perspectival movement from hill to clay tips to pool of water. The frame orientation alludes to the significance of the clay tip as a whole in a cosmological model of the world. The frame acts as a visual metaphor made into solid steel and serving to elucidate aspects of cosmology and creation.

We find ourselves within the Glynn Valley Observatory, a permanent outdoor installation fusing archaic science with sophisticated modern perceptual theory. There are large circular pits lined with concrete. Built to overlook the artificial lake, this series of concrete wells reflect in daylight the major stars of the Gemini constellation. The wells vary in depth according to the Magnitude of each star. They incorporate the sky by reflection and deal with the phenomenological perception of nature's grander movements. The pools of water are the eyes of the earth, like the holy wells they represent the "negative" receptive spirit of the earth. Shallow and mysterious rows of stone emerge from the grass, oriented to the sunrise of the summer solstice. The builders of this site were not trying to reproduce an ancient temple; instead, they were making an environment that gained a dimension by referring to the past from their own point in history. This observatory connects human behaviour and perception to the annual round; it is more concerned with time as a concretised abstraction than as a vehicle for cosmic meaning. Based on a dialectical synthesis between historical consciousness and astronomical time, its real function is the symbolic negation of cumulative knowledge, historical and scientific, through the choice of a model that we recognise as prehistoric. The negation only confirms that which is negated. Circular stone pits, lined with concrete, are arranged to align with solstices, equinoxes and moonrise. A stonewalled medieval field with a small concrete structure stands at the far side.
The solar tunnel is a huge brickwork pipe facing over a central void and oriented to the summer and winter solstices. For about 10 days around the winter solstice, the sun rises in the section of the pipe facing southeast and can be seen through the northwest section. At and around the summer solstice, the sunrise and sunset align to the northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast pipes sections. Breaks in the pipe reflect the configurations of Althena, Castor A, Castor B, Mebsuta, Pollux, Mekbuda, Wasat, Tejat Posterior, and Tejat Prior. During the day, these constellations are contained in the interiors of the tunnels, through starlit points of light on the concave walls. During the night, moonlight or starlight penetrates the darkness within, sometimes in the form of moonlike crescents. The shapes vary constantly, depending on the angle of the light. Thus an inversion of sky takes place; stars are cast down to earth as spots of warmth in the cool tunnel. The solar tunnel both exposes and protects. Though its great cylinder is of the same brown colour and material of the site, it offers only abstracted points of identification with the human body. The openings of the tubes, however, offer a microcosmic parallel between the human eye in looking and looking out. The broken form of the tunnel is a macrocosmic parallel of the form of the earth itself; which cannot be precisely defined mathematically. The earth's shape is a flattened spheroid or oblate sphere, and the best representation of its shape is an ellipsoid of rotation. We can consider the tunnel as a fertility symbol, exposing the falseness of place and demanding the equal redistribution of phallic matter and imagery. It is said that if someone with a health problem crawled through the tunnel nine times, then they would be cured. Children suffering from rickets were passed naked through the tunnel three times.

Read the book: The Bodmin Moor Zodiac by Nigel Ayers
www.nigelayers.com

Bodmin Moor Zodiac now on Facebook

2011-01-20T06:49:00.000-08:00

here's the link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bodmin-Moor-Zodiac/120175194721714

Tony Blair - War Criminal

2011-01-20T03:34:00.000-08:00

Tony Blair is at the Chilcot Equiry into the Iraq invasion again tomorrow.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/12/tony-blair-chilcot-iraq-inquiry
To: President of the United Nations General Assembly and the UK Attorney General

BWCF - THE BLAIR WAR CRIMES FOUNDATION

To The President of The United Nations General Assembly, H.E. Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, and The Attorney General of the United Kingdom, and their successors in office.

RE ANTHONY CHARLES LYNTON BLAIR

We, the citizens of the United Kingdom and other countries listed, wish to uphold The United Nations Charter, The 1998 Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court, The Hague and Geneva Conventions and the Rule of International Law, especially in respect of:-

1: 1949 Geneva Convention IV: Article 146
The High Contracting Parties undertake to enact any legislation necessary to provide effective penal sanctions for persons committing, or ordering to be committed, any of the grave breaches of the present Convention.

2: 1907 Hague Convention IV: Article 3
A belligerent party which violates the provisions of the said regulations shall, if the case demands, be liable to pay compensation. It shall be responsible for all the acts committed by persons forming part of its armed forces.

We therefore call on you to indict Anthony Charles Lynton Blair in his capacity as recent Prime Minister of the UK, so long as he is able to answer for his actions and however long it takes, in respect of our sample complaints relating to the 2003 Iraq War waged by the UK as ally to the United States of America.

We are concerned that without justice and respect for the rule of law, the future for us and our progeny in a lawless world is bleak, as revealed by recent US declarations about the use of torture and the events of December 2008 in Gaza show.

The following are our sample complaints relating to the Iraq War 2003-2009:

1: Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maimings and traumas.

2: Employing radioactive ammunition causing long-term destruction of the planetary habitat.

3: Causing the breakdown of civil administration, with consequent lawlessness, especially looting, kidnapping, and violence, and consequent breakdown of womens’ rights, of religious freedom, and child and adult education.

4: Failing to maintain the medical needs of the populace.

5: Despoliation of the cultural heritage of the country.

6: Supporting an ally that employs ‘waterboarding’ and other tortures.

7: Seizing the assets of Iraq.

8: Using inhumane restraints on prisoners, including dogs, hoods, and cable ties.

9: Using Aggressive Patrolling indiscriminately, traumatising women and children and wrecking homes and property.

10: Marking bodies of prisoners with numbers, writing, faeces and other degrading treatment.

11: The use of cluster bombs and other indiscriminate weapons including white phosphorous on “shake and bake” missions.

12: Supporting indiscriminate rocket attacks from F16 fighter planes on women and children in Fallujah in Nov 2004

13: Supporting the shooting up of ambulances and medical personnel in Fallujah in Nov 2004

14: Supporting the expulsion of the entire population of Fallujah save for young men of military age, for a reprisal attack on that city in Nov 2004.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html

Download this placard:

Nocturnal Emissions "Bodmin Parkway"

2011-01-01T09:02:00.000-08:00

Download the album at:
http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com
Nocturnal Emissions: "Bodmin Parkway (Disintegrated Public Transport mix)"
from "Nocturnal Emissions in Dub Volume One".

Lostwithiel Giants: New Year 2011

2011-01-01T07:18:00.000-08:00

Extraordinary Rendition

2010-12-26T06:20:00.001-08:00

Moonwalker

2010-12-26T04:48:00.000-08:00

Nigel Ayers
Moonwalker, 2010
wood, glass, plastic, metal, fabric, paint
14 x 10 x 2 inches

Action Painting : Windsor Free Festival 1974

2010-12-20T02:36:00.001-08:00

A little bit of footage of the cop I decorated with fluorescent green paint when he was beating up a peaceable member of the public at the Windsor Free Festival back in 1974. see my earlier blog about the free festivals.

The still image was in The Sun newspaper the next day (below) , the movie footage is from "Festival Britannia", which was broadcast on BBC4 in 2010.

The soundtrack is from "Extraordinary Rendition" by Nocturnal Emissions, 2010. (coming soon..)

29th August 1974,
After a week of low-key harassment, a horde of vicious coppers are wrecking everything at Windsor Free Festival. The boys in blue have dragged me out of my tent in the early hours of the morning and now the bastards are roughing up the young women running the free food kitchen that has sustained me for the week. I’ve a pot of fluorescent green poster paint in my pocket I’ve been carrying round for a while, thinking maybe I’ll do a bit of body painting with it or something... I chuck the whole pot over a particularly violent rozzer. The next thing I know this big ugly cop and two other flatfoots have jumped on me, they’ve got me down on the floor, twisting my arms up my back and dragging me along the turf by my hair in the direction of their Black Marias. “You’re nicked “they might have said except thirty or so public spirited citizens jump on top of PC Plod & his mates and somehow I get squeezed out from underneath this mass scrummage like a freshly ejaculated spermy thing.

I run off and swap clothes with a mate so I’m disguised and won’t be recognised. Later that night, I spot the big ugly cop he’s not bothered to clean himself up, he’s still got the paint on his face, dirty bugger. Next day he’s got his photo in The Sun “Target- a smeared face .. dignity intact” reads the caption. Oh I get it, propaganda. Dignity my arse, he was a thug.

It was a long time ago, but I kept the newspaper clipping, dull and monochromatic and old-school though it was. The coppers’ uniforms look like something out of Enid Blyton, that’s why they were called Plod. Hippies look funny. But it was good to be involved in that counter-cultural stuff.

The Free Festivals were amazing examples of good humoured insurrection, especially the Windsor one, squatting in the Queen’s back yard. Now everything’s so commercialized and you’ve got digital entertainment coming out of every orifice, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer and politicians keep mongering these horrible wars and it’s all for corporate greed. And sometimes it feels like there just isn’t any opposition any more, and then something wonderful happens, like Charles and Camilla get paint-bombed and the Tory HQ gets trashed and loads of what the ruling class doesn’t want you to know, but you know anyway but can’t really prove ,gets published by Wikileaks and you think, well maybe there’s hope for us all yet.

The other night there was this documentary, Festival Britannia, about the old festivals on TV and there’s footage of Windsor in it I’d never seen before and there’s a few seconds of the big ugly cop in it, this time in colour. I think I did a good job of the paint work.

The Lion of Goonzion - Landscape Giant embedded in Google Map

2010-12-16T07:56:00.001-08:00

Nested Signs in nested landscapes.

Many sightings of the Beast of Bodmin Moor say that it is lion-like, this could be a thought form emanation from the Leo Zodiac outline, which in turn may indicate the boundaries of a Mesolithic (and later Celtic) tribal area.

Leo’s body lies over Goonzion Downs, he is the Lion of Goonzion. Leo also stands on the village of Ley, it could be said that he is a “Ley lion”. Another place name that makes up his outline is Luna. Luna is the Latin name of the Earth's Moon as well as the Roman moon goddess Luna. Leo also stands over the 1412 Pant(h)ers Bridge.

This is such a dense and potentially dangerous system that attempts to give a workable summary of it would achieve nothing worthwhile.. see the book THE BODMIN MOOR ZODIAC by Nigel Ayers (2007).

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=50.487166,-4.576836&spn=0.038773,0.077162&t=h&z=14&iwloc=lyrftr:com.youtube.all,6572553384516215121,50.482197,-4.595718&lci=com.youtube.all

Virgin's Nipple Embedded in Google Map

2010-12-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=50.458532,-4.52604&spn=0.001212,0.002411&t=h&z=19&iwloc=A&lci=com.youtube.all

Constructed by Master Masons of the Highways Agency, The Virgin's Nipple is a ritual motor vehicle trackway designed to stimulate an erogenous zone within the Giant Effigy of Virgo in the Bodmin Moor Terrestrial Zodiac.

Nigel Ayers "Spoon" (1970)

2010-12-15T04:56:00.000-08:00

This is the first film I made. It's shot on Standard 8mm film stock in Tideswell, Derbyshire, 1970. I'd be 13 years old. The cast includes myself, John Allen, Danny Ayers, Mary Ayers and Nick Buttle. The original footage is silent. The soundtrack here is from Nocturnal Emissions "Duty Experiment" CD, recorded a decade later.

Nocturnal Emissions in Dub VOLUME 1

2010-12-04T08:49:00.000-08:00

Keeping Hope Alive

2010-11-30T02:21:00.001-08:00

Endo-cannibalism in the making of a recent British ancestor

Following his death in 1975, the ashes of Wally Hope, founder of Stonehenge People's Free Festival, were scattered in the centre of Stonehenge. When a child tasted the ashes the rest of the group followed this lead. In the following decades, as the festival increasingly became the site of contest about British heritage and culture, the story of Wally's ashes was told at significant times. His name continues to be invoked at gatherings today. This paper discusses these events as 'the making of an ancestor', and explores wider contexts in which they might be understood. These include Druidic involvement in the revival of cremation, Amazonian bone-ash endo-cannibalism, and popular means of speaking of and to dead relatives. In addition to considering the role of 'ancestors' in contemporary Britain, the paper contributes to considerations of 'ancestry' as a different way of being dead, of a particular moment in the evolution of an alternative religious neo-tribal movement, of the meanings of 'cannibalism', and of the ways in which human remains might be treated by the bereaved and by various other interested parties.

Harvey, Graham (2004). Endo-cannibalism in the making of a recent British ancestor. Mortality, 9(3), pp. 255–267.

see http://oro.open.ac.uk/3219/

see also http://www.earthlydelights.co.uk/netnews/wally.html

see also http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=180481282065&ref=mf

Bodmin Parkway (Disintegrated Public Transport mix)

2010-11-29T08:53:00.000-08:00

The Alternative Route

2010-11-29T02:38:00.000-08:00

Tanhouse Road, Lostwithiel, Cornwall 26 November 2010

Free Festivals, UFOs and the 1970s

2010-11-22T05:50:00.000-08:00

At the age of 16 I began spending my summers hitchhiking around the UK. Along my way, I attended various Free Festivals, notably events in Windsor Great Park in 1973 and 1974. The ethic of these festivals was completely different from that of commercial pop festivals, then or now. The Free Festivals were effectively mass proletarian squats of land, organised on an autonomous DIY-ethic of "bring what you expect to find". Free communal food supplies were organised as well as free entertainment in the form of "underground" rock acts & their light shows, often by "name" acts of the time - Hawkwind, Gong, as well as dozens of more obscure and unknown acts including the electronic band Zorch, the Stranglers, Joe Strummer's 101ers.

Arriving early and leaving late at these events, which tended to last for weeks rather than days, I got acquainted most of their organisers, I also found myself being interviewed and photographed by national newspapers. The ad hoc way these events were organised meant that people from the libertarian far left were joining forces with lifestyle anarchists others with far more right wing brands of individualism. Members of authoritarian cults such as the Hare Krishnas rubbed shoulders with anarcho-capitalist dope dealers, Hells Angels, gay liberationists, rock entrepreneurs, weekend hippies and quite a few ordinary normal people.

The 1974 Windsor Free Festival took place - without Royal permission - in the park adjoining the royal castle. The national press pretended to be scandalised by (true) stories of giveaways of thousands of tabs of LSD, public nudity and open cannabis smoking. After 10 days the festival was brought to abrupt end by a violent eviction carried out by hundreds of police officers. At one stage I myself was arrested and roughed up by three police officers, but several dozen public-spirited citizens helped enable my escape. Many of my friends were not so fortunate and ended up in police cells. I spent a night or two in a friend's house in London, then took up an invitation to join Fort Wally, a dissident camp within the Stonehenge complex, which I had briefly visited earlier.

I stayed for a few weeks in Fort Wally, a camp of 30 or so people, close to the Stonehenge monument in a communal geodesic dome.

There were many different motivations behind the people at the camp. Some were obviously from highly privileged backgrounds, some were minors who had run away from abusive parents, some were petty criminals and addicts, some were mentally ill, some were hardcore mystics and some were teenaged hedonists. During my time there, I managed to gain an access to the central circle of stones, to which the public are nowadays generally denied. On one occasion this was by vaulting a barbed wire fence, on others we were let in by the official custodians. The Stonehenge monument I found mysterious but disappointing. Stonehenge lacks the subtle aesthetic appeal of a site such as Avebury or indeed many of the thousands of smaller Neolithic sites scattered over the British Isles and Continental Europe. However, I became fascinated by the belief systems of the people I was associating with at the camp, and how their theories failed to measure up to experienced phenomena. Their faith in a DIY culture was one that I continue, perhaps naively, to share. Lifestyle anarchism was one which I had most difficulties with. I have never had the desire to live for any length of time in a commune, and I never embraced the primitivism of some of those who went on to become teepee dwellers. Recreational drug use had some benefits and many disadvantages. Already a long term sceptic, I took the mysticism with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the layers of meanings this prehistoric site had accrued.

One incident in particular stands out in my memory. On the night of the full moon, around midnight around 20 of us were admitted inside the fenced enclosure to the centre of the stones by a friendly night security man. Having got there, and having no unifying religious or scientific background, I wondered for a while what we were supposed to do. Someone suggested holding hands and chanting Om. I thought this suggestion was silly, as I couldn't see the relevance of a Hindu mantra to a European site of largely unknown origins that by all accounts predated that living Asian religion. But for want of a better plan, I joined in, staring at the night sky as we all chanted Oooooommmmmm. After a few minutes three objects appeared from the distance and flew high above our heads. There were three coloured lights on each of these objects each forming a triangle. I interpreted these objects to be helicopters from one of the nearby military bases and a coincidence that they should be on full-moon manoeuvres at same time we were omming. As far as I was concerned, the only strange thing about the experience was the helicopters were silent, I took this to be because they had been very high above us.

At the time I was unimpressed, but for some of the people there this was a very moving experience. A young man I met there, told me he felt like he was now full of an incredible energy and felt able to shout louder than anyone on earth. He also said, "Wasn't it great when the flying saucers appeared?". I humoured him. These were not flying saucers, they were triangles of light - nothing like the giant chrome hubcaps photographed by George Adamski and others. I thought the entire event was the ultimate in corniness and cliché. A circle of hippies chanting Om at Stonehenge at the midnight of a full moon - of course UFOs would appear - and of course no-one would believe me if I were to relate this story 30 years in the future. Later I learned that triangles of light belong to a certain category of UFOs and are not always thought to be of extra-terrestrial origin. Some have argued that these manifestations may in fact constitute a form of telepathic communications between the Earth Mother Gaia and her advanced primate surface dwellers. These thought-form communications often take on the appearance of shiny technological gadgetry with flashing lights, as this has been found to focus the attention of advanced primates. Years later, when working on a web site development in Dublin, I met man who told me he had been a RAF technician stationed on Salisbury Plain at this time, working on the development of silent helicopters. I think it is wise to neither believe nor disbelieve any of these explanations of what I experienced. Whether I can trust my memory of those events 30 years later is another question, but over time they have accrued a far more complex meaning for me than they ever did in my teenage years.

At the end of the summer of 1974 I was faced with a choice, either to join in an overland trek to India (in a former hearse), or to return to my Art Foundation course in Chesterfield. I chose the art course as I liked to experiment with technology, I liked the sort of art you could display indoors and I liked my home comforts.

However, my encounters with the counter culture furnished me with a reading list of unorthodox archaeology and redundant fringe belief systems. I enthusiastically consumed books such as John Michell's View Over Atlantis, Alfred Watkins' The Old Straight Track, Eric Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. I found myself reading these books mainly as entertainment, as fiction, though I also conducted hands-on experiments in ley-hunting, orgone accumulation, and the like. The visual side of these subjects, sacred geometry, pyramids, etc fed into my art work, as did some of my more nightmarish experiences with authoritarian society, which I don't have the space or inclination to deal with right now.

Experiences in the field showed me that reality matched neither an orthodox or an "alternative" view. All sides were obviously faking their results in order to support their preposterous theories. Exploring fringe beliefs was a useful tactic at art school, as I had at that time very little interest in, or knowledge, of art history. My art comes primarily from my own experience, my understanding of art history came later. I was using my hands and eyes and body to create real things in the world and through this interaction was examining my experience of the world. Using the structure of fringe beliefs, I could explain my work in non-art terms, referring to subject matter outside the "art world". At the same time, I think I may have disappointed anyone who assumed I actually believed in the subject matter I was exploring. I was covered by the fact that similar occultist tropes were being presented as Land Art by Richard Long, Robert Smithson etc, and as performance art and sculptural objects by Joseph Beuys and many others. So my work could easily be understood as being well within the parameters of acceptable art practice.

I do not think art is a mystical process. Any mysticism accrued to art making are largely the result of the alienations imposed by consumer society, and a hangover from the religious indoctrination of earlier centuries. However, I find it is often difficult to explain the processes of art-making, especially the "life" of art outside the "author" in any other ways than those of Magick. Magick, like post-modernism is a lot to do with manipulating symbols to influence consciousness. From whatever ethical, religious or political standpoint you take, to work in art is to work with real things and to do with exploring the fabric of reality, it is also about sharing that exploration and experience with other people.

Nigel Ayers, April 2006

Lostwithiel Floods

2010-11-17T04:34:00.000-08:00

Everything smells of mud.

Simple Rune Generator

2010-11-14T04:22:00.000-08:00

This machine kills fascists.

Fruiting Body

2010-10-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

Nocturnal Emissions
Fruiting Body
now available for download

Viral Shedding

2010-10-19T13:58:00.001-07:00

Nocturnal Emissions
Viral Shedding
now available for download:
http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/

Tissue of Lies

2010-10-16T16:08:00.001-07:00

Nocturnal Emissions
Tissue of Lies
now available for download:
http://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com/

The Dobwalls Virgin

2010-10-06T04:17:00.001-07:00

Nigel Ayers
The Dobwalls Virgin, 2010
wood, glass, acrylic paint, clay, tea, dill
9 3/4 x 9 3/4 x 1 3/4 inches

My Own Stonehenge

2010-09-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

Nigel Ayers
My Own Stonehenge, 2010
Wood, acrylic, plastics
6 x 6 x 3 inches

Sid Rawle R.I.P.

2010-09-22T03:32:00.000-07:00

The social activist Sid Rawle, or as the gutter press used to call him, "King of the Hippies", died last week.

In the '60s, he was one of the Hyde Park Diggers commune who were given an island, by John Lennon, off the coast of Ireland to establish an alternative society. He was often on the mic at the Free Festivals, officiating at marriages and funerals, and published International Times for a while. In the '80s he was with the Peace Convoy at the Molesworth peace camp and he's well-known to many in traveler and Green circles.

Our paths crossed quite a few times in the years following the police attack on the Windsor Free Festival in 1974. He was inspiring company.

R.I.P.

The Desiring Machines

2010-09-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

Emanation Machine

V1.01 responds to the emotional arousal of the user, as well as to environmental factors, providing an interface with residual energies in the etheric field. The device utilises a powerful 9 x 9 UV matrix, pedagogic voice enchanter and electro-mechanical counter. The potentiser contains a 30C homeopathic potency of Nux Vomica, pre-eminently the remedy for many of the conditions incident to modern life.

Etheric Link Machine

Contains electro-magnetic hand scanner, multiple etheric sensors and homeopathic potentiser, linked to a morphic resonator. In the hands of a trained operator, the Etheric Link Machine is an effective diagnostic and therapeutic instrument, its efficacy reliant on the ESP level of the user.

Intensity Production Machine

Contains Zenor activation buttons, multiple etheric sensors, electronic voice phenomenomiser and homeopathic potentiser. The Intensity Production Machine is good for you. It has ethical content. It illuminates the human condition. It reveals deep inner truths that cannot be expressed in words.

War Criminal - TV footage and documentation

2010-09-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

A compilation for you..

Music is "I See You're with Eeyore" from Nocturnal Emissions "Collateral Salvage", available for download in all the usual places and on CD as well.
End credit music is folk music recorded on the street in Iraq two weeks before the invasion.

The Virgin's Nipple: Twelve Woods Roundabout, Dobwalls, Cornwall

2010-09-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

The Bodmin Moor Zodiac is the largest piece of land art ever constructed in the U.K.

From Today's Papers

2010-09-05T01:32:00.000-07:00

Sunday Mirror

The Independent on Sunday

Daily Star
see:
http://www.nigelayers.com/warcrim/warcrimjan.html

Tony Blair - War Criminal
Poster, Flyer, Postcard
Nigel Ayers (2003)
Lostwithiel, Cornwall, UK

Image download 1.8 Mb: http://www.anti-war.us/gallery/PDFs/ayers2.pdf

or go shopping:

Citizen's Arrest on Blair

2010-09-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

Activist Kate O'Sullivan managed to get through tight security to confront Mr Blair as he held a book signing in Dublin.

The 24-year-old from Cork claims to have queued for 90 minutes and went through airport style security - handing in all her belongings and going through a metal detector - before she attempted to arrest Mr Blair.

She says the former Prime was blasé about her accusations: "He didn't say anything, He just signed the book, he looked down and then looked at security."

Ms O'Sullivan, a member of the Irish Palestine Solidarity Movement, was detained for almost half an hour before she was cautioned by gardai.

Earlier, shoes and eggs had been pelted at Mr Blair as he arrived at the bookshop on O'Connell Street in Dublin city centre.

http://www.nigelayers.com/warcrim/warcrimjan.html

War Criminal update

2010-09-04T06:21:00.001-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11187486

The project War Criminal is a psychic warfare exercise instigated in 2003. It will remain in operation until such time as the individuals it accuses, Tony Blair and George W Bush, are brought to justice in an appropriate international war crimes tribunal.

In 2003, I designed twin portraits of George W Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals. These were put to immediate use as placards in an anti-war demonstration in London. I also made the images available for free download on a couple of activist web sites. I soon heard they were being used as placards in a demonstration in Washington DC.

In November 2005, I opened my newspaper to find a reproduction of one of the images I'd designed, adorning the shirt of soccer superstar turned Third World activist Diego Maradona in an anti-Bush demonstration in Argentina. Images of Maradona bearing this image were prominent throughout the international news headlines on November 5th.

Subsequently, I made the images available in a variety of formats through a print- on-demand Internet company in the USA making a variety of household items - they can now be purchased as badges t shirts, beer mugs, dog blankets. This piece documents the ecology and democratic use of these two signs.

http://www.nigelayers.com/warcrim/warcrimjan.html

Musical Concrete

2010-08-02T00:38:00.000-07:00

A page from the book

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Beautiful-David-McCandless/dp/0007294662

I don’t know that I ever intended my music project Nocturnal Emissions to exemplify a genre – or sub-genre – of rock music. But I suppose often “genre” doesn’t just mean “style”, it can mean a collection of attitudes. And you know, we weren’t following a genre, we were creating it.

“Industrial” implies something to do with the alienation experienced by individuals in a society where money is king. “Ambient” means to do with your environment.

If I was doing a diagram, I'd place us a lot closer to dance music, dub and post-punk than metal.

But this diagram has to make more sense than back in 80s when Virgin Megastore would have Nocturnal Emissions in the same bin as the Nolans and the Notsensibles.

Though there were political and philosophical differences between ourselves and Coil, I can’t deny that we were on friendly terms back in the ‘80s .

I like this book, “Information is Beautiful”. I was browsing through at it at the Port Eliot Festival the other week. Here it is in a pile stacked behind Tim Smit and Jarvis Cocker:

Check it out:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Beautiful-David-McCandless/dp/0007294662

NETWORK NEWS the book is out now

2010-06-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

Sinister beasts, earth mysteries, the occult shenanigans of the royal family, the occult symbolism of British currency, time travelling punk rockers, Nocturnal Emissions merchandising and much, much more.

Includes interviews with: Walter Alter, Nigel Ayers, Muslimgauze, John Watermann, Zoviet France, etc.

Network News was produced between 1990 and 1999 by various authors associated with the Nocturnal Emissions project and distributed by Earthly Delights. While some pages of the original documents have been removed for legal reasons, the low fidelity production qualities, small print typefaces and obsolete contact information of the originals have been preserved as much as possible.

.. ..
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/network-news/11473955

Nocturnal Emissions: The Feotal Grave of Progress (1984)

2010-06-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

Cornish Space Suit

2010-06-12T03:12:00.000-07:00

Prototype model supplied by
Cornwall Community Space Program

read this book

David Lynch's Dune

2010-05-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

This is what Sting looked like in David Lynch's "Dune".

The films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

2010-05-10T08:33:00.001-07:00

Alejandro Jodorowsky was active as a film director in the 60s and 70s, following a career as an actor and director of experimental theatre and happenings.

Jodorowsky’s 1970 film El Topo was a surreal blend of the Wild West and eastern philosophy. Sort of Luis Bunuel meets Sergio Leone with a touch of Kenneth Anger and performance art thrown in: nudity, amputees, dead animals, lots of blood, spiritual philosophy and psychedelia. It was packaged and promoted as “midnight movie cult cinema” in the Elgin Cinema, New York, relying on word-of-mouth recommendation among Chelsea hipsters. And so, they say, it helped establish an “outsider” genre of films based on a culture of late-night screenings, reviving interest in neglected filmmakers like Tod Browning and Ed Wood, and providing an audience for new film makers like David Lynch and John Waters. Critic Ben Cobb writes that after enthusiastic recommendation by John Lennon , “El Topo screenings took the form of a drug-fuelled happening. People went to be mentally altered by the film, spiritually enriched or, at the very least, have an experience.”

John Lennon’s manager Allen Klein saw potential in Jodorowksy’s brand of druggy-exploitation cinema, bought the rights to El Topo and put the money up for his next film The Holy Mountain (picture below). Klein screened El Topo in a Broadway cinema, which immediately blew its credibility as far as its cultish audience was concerned. Having learned a marketing lesson, screenings of The Holy Mountain were limited to midnight slots on Fridays and Saturdays where they attracted a sizeable cult following for a remarkable 16 months.

Jodorowsky and Klein fell out over a new exploitation film project they were discussing. According to Jodorowsky “I weighed up my artistic integrity against fame and wealth. After a torturous half-hour, I reached my decision.” Allan Klein was furious and did his best to make sure that El Topo and The Holy Mountain were never screened, while Jodorowsky did his best to encourage the spread of bootlegs of the two films. There were legal battles until 2004 when some sort of reconciliation was reached and the films are now widely available on DVD.

Jodorowsky went on to make the exploitation film “Santa Sangre”, but seems to have been mostly occupied with a writing career, books on psychology and the tarot as well as the sort of adult graphic novels that are popular in France.

Jodorosky’s films El Topo and The Holy Mountain contain some of the most striking and strange sequences in modern cinema. They are masterpieces of grandiose self-indulgence, and have been a big influence on the likes of Matthew Barney. Their bizarre scenes and ritualized narrative structures are the sort of thing you grow accustomed to if you’re familiar with avant-garde and outsider art, but never with this kind of budget.

What is puzzling, then, is how these films ever got made. The extras on Jodorowsky's DVD collections show him at work doing tarot readings and conducting seminars on “Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy” (the title of his latest book). What becomes clear is that the guy is very persuasive and has great manipulative skills. The people with the money must have been suckers for that kind of scam back in the day...

Alejandro Jodorowsky's 'Dune: An Exhibition of a Film of a Book That Never Was was at Plymouth Arts Centre 2 April – 16 May 2010. Curated by Tom Morton. See review by Nigel Ayers.

for art cornwall

http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Films_of_Jodorowsky.htm

Alejandro Jodorowsky's 'Dune: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was

2010-05-10T08:30:00.001-07:00

Alejandro Jodorowsky's 'Dune: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was

Plymouth Arts Centre 2 April – 16 May 2010

Dune is a weighty Science Fiction novel written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965. The cover blurb by Arthur C. Clarke says its “unique among SF novels. I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings”.

There have been several attempts made to film the book, and the rights to it have passed through several hands. It has been the subject of a TV mini-series, and a new cinema version is currently being planned, to be directed by action specialist Pierre Morel.

1984 saw David Lynch's version of the book. Lynch's Dune was not well-received by critics and performed poorly at the American box office. Lynch distanced himself from the project, stating that pressure from both producers and financiers restrained his artistic control and denied him final cut privilege.

In some versions of the film Lynch's name is replaced in the credits with the name of a fictional director Alan Smithee : a pseudonym used by directors who wish to be disassociated from films they have worked on. In fact, like a lot of bad sci-fi, David Lynch’s Dune retains a fairly large cult following.

Before Lynch, in 1976, Alejandro Jodorowsky was given the job of directing the film. He gathered around him a group of collaborators including the Swiss artist HR Giger, who later designed the movie Alien, the French graphic novel artist Moebius, and English sci-fi artist Chris Foss. Pink Floyd were to provide the soundtrack and the proposed cast was to feature Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, David Carradine and Salvador Dali. Dali was to play the Emperor of the Universe who ruled from a golden toilet-cum-throne in the shape of two intertwined dophins, their mouths designed to receive, respectively, urine and excrement: “Dali considers it very bad taste to mix piss and shit”.

But Jodorowsky never got the finance and the project was abandoned. All that survives are the director's notes and production drawings by Giger, Moebius and Foss.

Jodorowksy has written about his adventures in film-making as a process of spiritual discovery and has said film-making should be a way of losing money, not making it. “Contemporary art” tends to be all about about price tags and status, so I was interested to see the interpretation of this material by the contemporary artists in this touring show. I hoped for something over-the-top and mystically bonkers.

In the downstairs room there’s a chrome head with raffia hair and bulging eyeballs. This is a Steven Claydon piece. The chromed metal looks like it may have once been a colander and yes, it could easily be a portrait of the young Jodorowsky strung out on amphetamine...

On the opposite wall is a portrait print also by Claydon. It’s not Jodorowsky. Perhaps this is a portrait of Frank Herbert? I look at the label and find it’s a portrait of Somerset Maugham. I wonder what Somerset Maugham has got to do with the film that never was? Tom Morton's notes say it may “be read as a stand-in for the Emperor Shadam IV (Maugham’s stately pleasure dome Villa Mauresque recalls the Emperor’s golden planet)”. So, it’s not Emperor Shadam IV, it’s not the Emperor’s golden planet, it’s a portrait of an author who once wrote a book with a scene in it that was similar to a scene in Dune. So this is the Portrait of the Author of a Book That Contains a Scene In It That is Similar to a Scene in The Book...

Vidya Gastaldon's paintings are small, pleasant watercolours with pieces of Herbert's text written on them. They're a bit like William Blake's in style, only William Blake put a bit more effort in. Blake would have also used his own secret method of printing and his own text, whereas Gastaldon 'has used Herbert's novel as an i-Ching-like instrument of divination, flicking through the pages at random and then making an image based on the first line her eyes alight on'. So she hasn't actually read Dune, she's just skimmed though it a bit? I love the way contemporary artists cut corners!

Upstairs there are materials actually related to Jodorowsky's Dune project: a set of nice big illustrations by both Giger and Foss and loads of magazine clippings about the project.

On the top floor, in the exhibition space, there's Day Jackson's piece. His human skull morphing into platonic solids seems to be in a Jodorowsky groove, and there's a load of science fiction comics on loan from a local shop, and some reading matter on the subject of science fiction illustration.

Curator Tom Morton writes that the remains of Jodorowksy's Dune project: “reveal a potential future for sci-fi movie making that eschewed the conservative, technology-based approach of American filmmakers in favour of something closer to a metaphysical fever-dream...In 1977, George Lucas' Star Wars was released and the history of sci-fi filmmaking and even mainstream cinema, would never be the same again”

I'm not so sure that the sci-fi movie genre and mainstream cinema has become so much technology-based as effects-based in its approach, and that beneath this layer of sensationalism its underlying ethos is to re-inforce the fears and insecurities that drive the modern hyper-capitalist economies. There seems instead in Jodorowsky's sacrificial film-making an attempt to blow apart those insecurities and enter into something akin to personal freedom and autonomy, using film as an uninhibited process of spiritual discovery, rather than a means to make money for corporations.

But then the guy is so obviously barmy that it's hard to tell.

Nigel Ayers 27/4/10

photos by Lesley Ayers

for http://www.artcornwall.org/

Duloe Stone Circle

2010-04-30T03:37:00.000-07:00

The Pump - CD review

2010-04-07T06:12:00.001-07:00

Written by Justin Patrick
Sunday, 04 April 2010

For Nigel Ayers the systematic derangement of the senses has never been enough. From the beginning of his career he has sought nothing less than the total disarrangement of reality. Using slowed down voices, sludgy bass, noisy analog synthesizers, guitar and weird effects, these unorthodox statements from his first band sound as if they were made in an atmosphere of cerebral discord. Conventions of musicality are thwarted in favor of shoestring arrangements gelled together by intuition rather than adherence to preconceived formulas. Traversing terrains that range from the psychotropic to psychotic, the collected works of The Pump make for an artifact that is not easily pigeon holed, not now, and probably not in the late 1970s when the group first formed with his brother Daniel Ayers and the late Caroline K.

Klanggalerie

This CD collects together music from two cassettes originally released by the band in tiny editions circa 1980. The tyranny of Dolby noise reduction doesn't seem to be present, though they have been remastered and presented all together on a compact disc. The songs are very far from concise but exhibit a playful malevolence that is nevertheless enjoyable. All but one of these 19 tunes are under five minutes in length, with many being less than two. I don't think they were kept short to gain more attention for radio airplay: the only hooks these songs have are the squelchy electronic kind that dig into your brain. Though as far as dirty basement scuzz goes, this is some of the best available.

Nigel Ayers has a knack for naming songs. I'm sure he had quite a hand in giving these their names because reading the list is almost as fun as listening. “Inner Riot Cola” starts the disc off and sets the right mood with a bit of microphone fuzz and a voice saying, “Hello. I'm talking very highly...my voice will be slowed down when I play it back, and it will sound normal.” The high pitched voice sounds remind me of a soda drinking kid who has had too much caffeine, and I considered the rest of the disc in light of that voice, as it is filled with the same playful exuberance and boundless energy that children know. Unhampered by rules and regulations The Pump made up its own musical game, owing little to other styles and trends. In doing so they attacked rigid minds in an attempt to break them down. This is nowhere more evident than in “The Eleven Thousand Year QC,” a rambling science fictional monologue and political diatribe. One of the things I admire about Nigel is that he has never shied away from making his music political, and in this song the words “duty experiment” are mentioned for the first time, a motif that he explores more thoroughly in the guise of Nocturnal Emissions. Read in a stately monotone it sounds like a newscast from a far dystopian future, with peculiar electronics lurching underneath it all.

The next song ,“Earth Vows,” is one of the best. The ebb and flow of ominous phase shifters is accompanied by what sounds like telemetry and smothered hand drums. The false hints of melody fade in and out obscured by speaker hum. “Futures Unlimited” has a static drum machine beat, nostalgically cheap and dated sounding, with a warbling bass line that keeps it all together. It doesn't matter that the bass and beat aren't exactly in sync—it's like they are there only to give a context to the other spastic and dithering noises. “Slangy Policies” is another gem: a synth stonewashed in reverb has the focus now, accompanied at times by vaguely martial percussion. “Bats Fist” is another teetering and gnarly bit of synth slush. This is the kind of noise I like, stuff that is not reliant on volume levels to make an impact, or on shrillness, but is composed of wobbly textures that make me feel unbalanced, mentally and otherwise. “In A Box” is a sound poetry piece, with Caroline K's voice mixed with a clutter of debris.

Briefly on “Unsoiled Nukes” things sound like they could blast off into a kraut-infused free-for-all where the rhythmic elements might finally find some cohesiveness. At 53 seconds though it just doesn't last (I love it anyway). Attention is paid throughout most of the songs to the mixing specific sounds to either the left or right channel exclusively. Nowadays, while panning is just one trick in an arsenal of studio techniques, most albums tend to be more subtle with it, but I like it when things are panned hard to one or the other side. “Is it something I said?” is the longest song on the disc, and sounds like it was recorded at a live performance, as it has a much more mono sound then the rest, and whooping voices can be discerned in the background. Of all the tracks it is the most visceral and has the most squeal. I like the garbled and melted sounding voice that taunts throughout, making the unnerving buzz and unyielding oscillations tolerable (left alone I don't know if they would be).

Some of these songs were included on the Nocturnal Emissions “Lest We Forget” 4xLP+7" set from Vinyl-On -Demand that came out in 2008. This disc however includes all the material released by The Pump and is thus a perfect edition for the serious collector.

from
http://brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8153&Itemid=96

Lusitania - artist's book out now

2010-03-20T06:21:00.000-07:00

Lusitania is an artist’ book work reproduced from documents first assembled in 1977. The found images and texts were printed on a variety of A4-size papers and mirrored foil using various multi-coloured screenprint, duplicating machine, photocopy and collage processes. The original documents were flood-damaged in 1994 and evidence of the resulting textures and coloration can be seen in this production.

Exhibition history: a version of this piece, Lusitania Wallchart, was selected as part of the national Young Contemporaries exhibition in Manchester, United Kingdom, 1977.
Product Details
Publisher Earthly Delights
Copyright ©2010 Nigel Ayers (Standard Copyright License)
Language English
Country United Kingdom
Publication Date March 14, 2010

Page Count 28 pages
Size A4
Binding Saddle Stitch
Interior Color Full-color

Mission To Libra: The Bodmin Moor Zodiac

2010-03-11T09:58:00.001-08:00

The sun is in this sign from 24th September to 23rd October. An air sign.
Key words: beauty, art, partnership, tact, charm, relaxation, affection, compromise, diplomacy, laziness.
Light or planet: Venus.
Body parts: kidneys, lumbar region.

Libra lies in the line connecting the bright stars Spica in Virgo and Antares in Scorpio. The Arabic names of the bright stars in Libra (the scales or balance) indicate that they formerly belonged to the scorpion, Zubenelgenubi means the southern claw and Zubenelschemali the the northern claw. Zebeneschimali is one of the only green stars which can be seen without a telescope. The sun entered Libra on the day of the autumn equinox; the name represents the equilibrium between day and night and between the seasons. The constellation has been known as the scales, a symbol of justice, balance and harmony, since the time of ancient Rome. It has been said that the Romans created Libra from the Scorpions claws, giving the scales to Astraea, the goddess of justice who we now know as Virgo. Their origin has also been traced to 2000 BC to ancient Babylon when this was the season of the weighing of souls and the judgement of the living and the dead. Mens souls are in the balance at the time when day and night are equal. Iota Libra is a multiple star with Component A being of 4.5 Magnitude and Component B being of 9.4 Magnitude. The eclipsing binary Delta Librae changes its brightness from 4.9 to 5.9 Magnitude within a 2.33 day cycle. It is about 300 light years away.
The scales are an analogue device that measures continuous information in an infinite number of possible values. The only limitation on resolution is the accuracy of the measuring device. By contrast, a digital system is one that uses discrete values, representing numbers or non-numeric symbols such as letters or icons, for input, processing, transmission, storage, or display.

Initial Visualisation, prior to field work

The scales lie around Rosecraddock and close to the Wheal Tor Inn, the highest inn in Cornwall. The handle of the scales is formed by the road that runs from St Cleer through Tremar Coombe past Polwrath to Darite. From the church at Darite, through Crows Nest to Higher Trethake runs the cord that suspends the northern scale which is formed by a system of fields on Fore Down. Below the northern Scale lies Newton Farm, this reminds us of Newtons discovery of gravity as the force that works the scales. The process of weighing is suggested by hamlet immediately below the scale, known as Wayland. The cord which suspends the southern scale is formed by the road that runs from St Cleer Post Office across St Cleer Downs, past the water works. The southern scale itself is formed by a complex of fields enclosing Trenabe and Treneath. St Cleer is one of the larger Cornish parishes and has been inhabited for more than 6000 years. The village has two public houses, a post office and a general store. For thousands of years metal ores have been dug from the ground in this parish, first tin ores from open works and later copper ore from deep mines. In the nineteenth century 3000 men, women and children were employed in mining, a boom that led to the building of new villages like Darite and Minions. St Cleer Well, sanctified by St. Clarus, was said to cure insanity and blindness when a patient was ducked in the water.

.. see the book THE BODMIN MOOR ZODIAC by Nigel Ayers (2007).

Mission to Leo: the Lion of Goonzion

2010-03-05T14:01:00.000-08:00

This is such a dense and potentially dangerous system that attempts to give a workable summary of it would achieve nothing worthwhile.. see the book THE BODMIN MOOR ZODIAC by Nigel Ayers (2007).

Artistic License

2010-03-02T04:17:00.000-08:00

On Spatial Detournement

2010-03-02T01:18:00.000-08:00

Since the 1950s, guerrilla sign ontologists, situationists and psychogeographers have delighted in using the power of the map to decode the urban landscape. They have explored Manchester using a map of Milan , wandered Newcastle guided by a map of the Berlin U-Bahn, and explored Hackney with a map of the moon. This re-use of maps may at first sight seem to be a simple economy measure, but these were in fact experiments aimed at creating spatial détournements, subverting the commodified image of the city. By the intentional misreading of city space, the city would “be experienced not as a thing at all, but as possibilities”. Our ritual walks are in contrast to the concept of the dérive meaning an aimless walk that follows the whim of the moment, sometimes translated as a drift.

French philosopher Guy Debord used the dérive idea to encourage readers to revisit the way they looked at urban spaces. Rather than being prisoners to their daily routines, living in a complex city but treading the same path every day, he urged people to follow their emotions and to look at urban situations in a radical new way. The notion was that most of our cities are so thoroughly unpleasant because they were designed in a way that either ignored their emotional impact on people, or indeed tried to control people through their very design. The basic premise of the dérive is for people to explore their environment without preconceptions, to understand their location, and therefore their existence. The flaw in Debord’s notion is that town and rural planners now use very sophisticated methods of emotional route-manipulation to move consumers through a series of consumables. The radical way to counter this manufactured routing is not to rely on emotion to guide us, but instead to devise more precise and radical methods of rambling. A better way to explore space is instead to adapt another of Debord’s concepts, that of the détournement, where an artist reuses elements of existing media to create a new work with a different meaning, often one opposed to the original. Détournement is similar to satirical parody, but often employs more direct reuse or mimicry of the original works rather than constructing a new work, which merely alludes strongly to the original. Another technique we suggest is to adapt the cut-up or fold-in technique to design walking routes. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin applied this to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material’s implicit content, hypothesising that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, “When you cut into the present the future leaks out”. Burroughs also further developed the fold-in technique as a method for altering reality. Burroughs’ explanation was that everything that could be recorded could be edited. Later the CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective developed behavioural cut-ups as a method of changing one’s life by performing activities which are created by cutting up two socially acceptable, routine behaviours and recombining them to form an new more amusing activity. The intention is that you perform a series of cut-ups for a long period until it becomes second nature and your behaviour is altered significantly. Détournements, fold-ins and cut-ups may all be contrasted with recuperation, in which originally subversive works and ideas are themselves appropriated by mainstream media.

In spatial détournement, a rambler reuses elements of a known territory to explore a new psychic space with a different meaning, often one beyond the boundaries of the “original”. In this case maps of outer space are folded into maps of terrestrial space. So our ritual walks are spatial détournements based on precise plans to overturn external temporal/spatial manipulation of our rambling. We have created our own walking system instead of being enslaved by another man’s. We do not advise others to follow these routes, but instead to create their own pathways of exploration. Looking at the patterns drawn on a landscape allows us to analyse their origins in the communication between human and animal life, technology and landscape. A detailed study gives us insight into how we remember our travels. Using GPS, a follow-up analysis of a created map provides a different perspective on how the Bodmin Moor Zodiac was organised. By looking at various data from above, below and within, moving through both time and space, we are able to make additional observations, analysis and conclusions regarding our rambles that might not be possible from ground level.

From the book Bodmin Moor Zodiac by Nigel Ayers

From Lostwithiel to Dobwalls to Trago

2010-02-24T14:51:00.001-08:00

GPS traces of last week's expedition.

Nested signs in nested landscapes

2010-02-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

Our experiments in spatial detournement are beginning to show up within the "official" Google Maps site.

Click here to view live
or click View Larger Map (in the live link below) then More.. and tick Videos

View Larger Map

The methods that we have briefly dealt with here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize.

We will postpone the development of these theses until later.

see also
http://www.artcornwall.org/webprojects/bod%20moor.swf

The Walls of Dobbe

2010-02-23T11:41:00.001-08:00

Using a dowsing instrument like a map, or a digitalised aerial photograph, allows your subconscious to tap in to the wealth of information available from this superconscious energy.
aerial photo from google maps

View Larger Map
the above as embedded data

see also http://nigelayers.blogspot.com/2010/02/walls-of-dobbe.html

It follows, therefore, that dowsing using digital information is the most physical type of dowsing because it is closely related to your body's own sensitivity to the informational currents that surround us. Using computer graphics in this research allows the physical body to tune in to electrical currents. It becomes more psychic in nature however, because you really have to let your rational mind let go of preconceptions in order to get in touch with energies of which you may not be fully conscious. This simple intuition is the reason many people talk to their computers.

http://bodminmoorzodiac.blogspot.com/

The Virgin of Dobwalls

2010-02-21T04:31:00.000-08:00

Kinetic Figurine by Nigel Ayers. 18 cm / 7 inches high. Slow motion video.

The Walls of Dobbe

2010-02-20T14:31:00.001-08:00

The Walls of Dobbe, a group of three stone circles in the village of Dobwalls, Cornwall. These circles are interpreted as aspects of a lunar goddess. The first circle represents the left hand crescent moon, or virgin, and comprises of seven irregular granite stones. The second circle, represents the full moon or mother, also comprises seven irregular stones of similar height. The third circle represents the left hand crescent moon or crone and stands beside a row of trees. It consists of six stones, one of which is distinctively pointed and taller than the rest. As water courses run below the stone circles, the power of the stones are encapsulated and controlled by the cultural form of the triple circle. The centre axis of the circles extends southwards into an accurate moon observation line, whilst to the north it marks the rising of the star Spica. These stones of the triple mother-circle are finely and firmly set. They are cleft but not further tooled. At the centre of each stone circle the original carved and finished central stones have been replaced by cast iron plates.

These stones of the triple mother-circle are finely and firmly set. They are cleft but not further tooled. At the centre of each stone circle the original carved and finished central stones have been replaced by cast iron plates. Each plate is inscribed with a replica of the labyrinths that were originally carved on the central stones. These labyrinths seem to have served as dance mats in the triple centres of this ritual place.

Sacred Dance Mat

2010-02-20T12:06:00.001-08:00

The honouring of Sophia as the mystical bride of the philosophers or "mistress of the inner world" , often intersects with worship of divine Mercurial water. Here, the tree-crowned Sophia stands upon a sacred dance mat.

The dance mat is inscribed with a labyrinth design. The labyrinth is a weaving or spinning image, referring to a woman's capacity to weave a child in the fabric of her own body. A Hindu birth ritual involves sketching the labyrinth in saffron on a bronze plate and washing it off with water. It is then fed to the pregnant woman.This thereby permits the child to move easily through the labyrinthine seven uterine "wombs". There are two holes cut through the dance mat plates marking where a cord (representing the umbilical cord) may have been threaded.