Microplastic Contamination

 

Microplastic Contamination
Audio visual installation by Nigel Ayers. 

Three TV screens show close-up footage of acrylic paints and other substances flowing, floating and dispersing in milk and water, accompanied by the sound of the early morning tide in Duporth, Cornwall.

 

St. Bartholomew's Church, 
Lostwithiel, Cornwall, 
12 September 2026 

 

 

The Visual Art of Nigel Ayers

 

Charlotte Bill and the Nocturnal Emissions

Northern English artist Charlotte Bill can be credited for her contribution to the unique acoustic character of Nocturnal Emissions’ work in the early to mid 1990s. Her improvisations on flute, oboe and other instruments were “decomposed”, remixed and reprocessed by Nigel Ayers notably on the CD releases: Magnetized Light, Blasphemous Rumours, Friction & Dirt and Binary Tribe.
 

Charlotte created film projections for Nocturnal Emissions live performances in Canada and has made several animated and experimental films soundtracked by, and sometimes in collaboration with, Nocturnal Emissions founder, Nigel Ayers. In the past Charlotte has also played in The Fall , The Fates, The Blue Orchids, Morning Glory and the Shillelagh Sisters.  

 

Charlotte first performed with Nocturnal Emissions as a fire-blower in unforgettable shows in the Ambulance Station and the ICA, London in 1984/1985. She is nowadays better known for her art films, TV documentaries and as founder member of filmmaking collective Clapham Film Unit. ](https://charlottebill.com/) 

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8915449/

 

 

 Charlotte will be making a live guest appearance with Nocturnal Emissions in the Farmers Arms, Penzance, March 2nd 2024.

Nigel Ayers in Conversation with Noise Extra

We were delighted to have Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions join us for a fascinating discussion. To celebrate the release of the new book “Electronic Resistance”, Nigel took us back to the early days of industrial culture through the lens of Nocturnal Emissions. We get into working with MB and SPK, early mail art contacts, and how NE’s approach evolved throughout the years. Another mandatory history lesson is now in session.

Order the “Electronic Resistance” book: https://www.amaya-productions.com
Get your own Nocturnal Emissions to listen to: https://nocturnalemissions.bandcamp.com
Follow us on Instagram: @noisextra
Follow us on Twitter: @noisextraaa
Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/noisextra

 HERE IS THE LINK:

 https://www.noisextra.com/2021/12/01/in-conversation-with-nigel-ayers-of-nocturnal-emissions/?fbclid=IwAR1t-0w-y3zOICOqGgwsTdchFVXUc5tzFiylgzWcY8xmQj9sMNvLZ2nLGQs

Electronic Resistance by Nigel Ayers

Nigel Ayers on Electronic Resistance - the book

Since the late 1970s, Nigel Ayers (b. 1957, UK) has cut a bracing, subversive path through the contemporary underground, bridging DIY industrial enthusiasms with multimedia experimentation to form a singular body of work. Co-founder of the groups The Pump and Nocturnal Emissions (along with brother Daniel Ayers and then-partner Caroline K), Ayers has been a contributor to and proponent of industrial music’s high-water marks, his Sterile Records imprint disseminating not only NE sides but also defining work from Lustmord, SPK, Maurizio Bianchi, and others between 1979 and 1986. In 1987, Ayers inaugurated the Earthly Delights label with the now-canonical Caroline K recording Now Wait For Last Year, and the imprint has since served as Ayers’s primary outlet for releasing new work, whether as Magnetizdat, Spanner Thru Ma Beatbox, or Nocturnal Emissions, a going concern to this day.

Published, designed, and produced by Ross Waitman and Amaya Productions in collaboration with the artist, ELECTRONIC RESISTANCE compiles mail-art, collages, assemblages, flyers, slides, video stills, ephemera, record and tape covers to present an arresting cross-section of the genre-sundering art Nigel Ayers created between 1980 and 1992. It features an introductory reflection from Ayers, as well as an essay entitled “Bleeding Images: Antipsychiatry, Death, and Mind Control” by art historian and critic Nicholas Ballet (Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), contextualizing Ayers’s work and extensive career.

ELECTRONIC RESISTANCE is 9.25" x 12.25", 160 pages, full color offset, quarterbound wrap hardcover. Printed by Edition One (Oakland, CA). Limited edition of 750 copies.

Signed and embossed risograph print limited to 250. Limited print measures 7.5" x 12"

To get the print edition order direct from: www.amaya-productions.com

RETAILERS / DISTROS:

Soleilmoon Recordings (Oregon)

https://www.soleilmoon.com

Digital Regress (California)

https://digitalregress.com

Rubycon Records (Los Angeles)

https://www.instagram.com/rubycon_recordsla

These Days (Los Angeles)

https://www.thesedaysla.com

Scream & Writhe (Quebec City)

https://www.screamandwrithe.com

Sentimental Youth (Berlin)

https://www.sentimentalyouth.com

Industrial Coast (UK) 

https://industrialcoast.bigcartel.com

Torn Light (Ohio)

https://www.tornlightrecords.com

Some Kinda Mushroom

Devils & Developers

David Hockney and a Dangerous Building

03 Nigel Ayers on Dub Conference in 10 Downing Street

Trade Nuclear Space Mission

Trade Nuclear Space Mission: how I subverted the nuclear arms race in India, 1979

Four Compositions for John Fare

Recorded in 2005.

John Charles Fare was born in 1936 in Toronto and attended Forest Hill College. In 1959 he moved to London to study architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, but soon left to live in Copenhagen. He was briefly held in a mental health facility for exposing himself in public at performances. After his release, he was re-arrested for gluing objects to a car.

The car's owner, musician and inventor Golni Czervath, did not press charges and befriended Fare. The two developed a robotic operating table with painter Gilbert Andoff. The first performance was a lobotomy on Fare in June 1964. All performances were performed on a Friday.

By the time Fare performed at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto on 17 September 1968, he "was short one thumb, two fingers, eight toes, one eye, both testicles, and several random patches of skin." The amputated parts were preserved in alcohol. That evening, he had his right hand amputated.

Fare's body was fitted with small microphones, which transmitted his pulse and breathing frequency in a distorted fashion. Fare performed six more shows between 1968 and 1972.

Source: Wikipedia (accessed 06.03.2020)

Concrete Shelves Interview

Nigel Ayers – “You don’t have to learn anything to do art or music. You learn by doing them. They are the most natural things to do in the world”

Read the full interview here

 

Original Artwork now Availaible

I have just set up an Etsy shop to make this set of Bodmin Zodiac mini collages available, they are all 6 x 4 inches including the card mounts:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/NigelAyers

Pussy Riot Shrine meets Pussy Riot

Today the Pussy Riot Shrine

 received the blessing of Masha Alyokina of Pussy Riot.

see also:

https://nigelayers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/icon-of-protest.html

https://nigelayers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/pussy-riot-shrine-created-in-lostwithiel.html

https://nigelayers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/pussy-riot-shrine_3.html

It's an Eighties thing

Vintage Nocturnal Emissions flyer spotted in this show at the Centre Pompidou, Paris

Art installation at Tintagel Castle

New Art installation at Tintagel Castle:

Sackcloth wrapped stones at King Arthur's birthplace.

Monstermind: The magical life and art of Tony "Doc" Shiels

Monstermind by Rupert White is packed with rare photos, a well-researched tale of the magical life and art of Tony “Doc” Shiels, surrealist, magician and creator of folklore.

From Doc’s involvement  in the ‘50s St Ives art scene– then the hippest happening place in the world for abstract art - to being barred from St Ives pubs for being a beatnik (I  know how it feels, I was there a decade or so later), being banged up in St Ives nick for barmy behaviour  (likewise), and onto  increasingly surrealistic monster-raising stunts...
Check out how Doc conjures up Morgawr, the Falmouth sea serpent, (or was it a sea-slug?), the Ponsanooth Fairy Photos, the Owlman of Mawnan.

Many other curious entertainments feature in the book.

In the mid-70s Shiels and his family became known in tabloid newspapers as “The weirdest family in the land”.

As it says on the cover, “Shiels used skills learnt as an artist to manipulate the public in a brazen and audacious display of theatrical, imaginative daring. In the process he left an indefinable but not insignificant magical and artistic legacy”.

 All these years after the two sevens clashed, I’m not sure what rates as the magical highlight of 1977, was it the situ-shamanism of the New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, was it the Hammer House of Windsor’s Jubilee itself, or was it was it Doc Shiels’ manifestation of the Loch Ness Monster?

Monstermind offers a welcome antidote to the horrid occult practices of the likes of Aleister Campbell and may help those of you still suffering from the theeee goth hangover onto the road to recovery…

A cracking read.
Doc's paintings rock.
Also, there's some very good  bits in here where Rupert contextualises Doc's practice in terms of developments in dematerialised art.

Now I want the big glossy coffee table-sized monograph. 

 (Will somebody publish one, please?)


Nnid Nid!!!

Monstermind: The Magical Life and Art of Tony 'Doc' Shiels:
Paperback: 157 pages
Publisher: Antenna Publications; First edition (1 Feb. 2015)
 ISBN-10: 0993216412
ISBN-13: 978-0993216411
Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Monstermind-Magical-Life-Tony-Shiels/dp/0993216412


 

Persuasion: Industrial music and mind control (1975-1995)

Some vintage Nocturnal Emissions material is included in:
Persuasion: Industrial music and mind control (1975-1995)
exhibition in HEAD, Geneva

 

"The England in the 1970s witnessed the emergence of industrial music bands involved in a counterculture that operated as a platform of exchange between the arts. The industrial movement committed an elaborated thinking between graphics, music, performance and video art in an experimental framework and under the increasing influence of technology. Some emblematic artists of this movement were aware of the important role of the media and the new form of power that went along with the ability to manipulate mobs.

 The exhibition "Persuasion: Industrial music and mind control (1975-1995)" highlights the visual productions of industrial artists that reveal a growing interest in mind control. A regular practice of mail art and collage allowed industrial artists to design album covers, fanzines and posters as a means of spreading their music to a wider audience. These artistic media reflect today a prolific visual culture with an interest for mind control. This phenomenon is presented here in three sequences identified by the titles of some songs or videos. The sound and image in mental conditioning (How to Operate Your Brain), the surgical experience in psychiatry (Suture Obsession) and the sonic warfare of industrial music (Nothing Short of a Total War) establish a link with science from the military in the 1960s and 1970s. Referrals, perpetual détournements and quotes that feed industrial culture from military researches are manifested by the development of a unique underground press. The Industrial News magazine by Throbbing Gristle and the RE/Search publications give examples of these strategies that reveal the aesthetic of industrial music.


 The works of Autopsia, Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, Club Moral, Esplendor Geométrico, La NomenKlaTur, Le Syndicat, M.B., Maeror Tri, Minamata, Nocturnal Emissions, Nurse With Wound, Pacific 231, Psychic TV, RE/Search, SPK, The Anti-Group, Sordide Sentimental, The Hafler Trio, Throbbing Gristle, Urbain Autopsy, Zorïn are exposed in this exhibition."

 http://www.hesge.ch/head/evenement/2015/persuasion-musique-industrielle-et-controle-mental
And here is the Facebook link:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1578106725808306/

Icon of Protest