2024
This introduction to and overview of transmission: londonunderlondon marks the publication of Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method, and NTS Radio’s broadcasting of a new mix of the groundbreaking 2005 audio essay by Justin Barton and Mark Fisher, which explores London’s dreams of invasion and incursion
Mark and I made londonunderlondon for broadcast on Resonance FM, London, between 2003 and 2005. We did most of the editing in 2005. Mark wrote the section that has been given the name ‘necropolis now’ and I wrote the section that has been named ‘when space breaks open.’
When we were making the audio essay we became aware in the last two months that the structure we had created did not fit with the 90 minutes we had been given by the Resonance FM weekly ‘clear spot’ time-frame.
From the outset, eighteen months before the 2005 broadcast on Resonance FM (the outset in terms of when we started planning) the main structure or dynamic was ‘The Quiet Man’, The Drowned World, The Waves, ‘necropolis now,’ and ‘when space breaks open,’ with the acted interviews of ‘when space breaks open’ appearing as precursor samples in the first part of the piece.
In the process of making londonunderlondon there were moments of serendipity, like discovering the sample of the rhyme ‘see-saw Sacradown / what is the way to London town’ with a few weeks to go before the broadcast date, and then there were discoveries and inclusions where key aspects of what we were including did not work very well. We would talk about these afterwards: we knew what was good about these elements within the work, but were aware they were points where the specific intensity of the piece had been allowed to drop, and where something was there which could confuse, or ‘obscure the view.’
In fact, all along, the length of the piece should have been closer to that of On Vanishing Land (44:51), rather than 90 minutes. We didn’t do anything about this (although we would occasionally talk about it), because we were busy with other projects. We got as far as talking about the editing out of the inclusions that we knew did not move the audio essay forward, but we never started on an edit.
In 2022 I decided to listen closely to the piece again, with the idea of making an edited version, and I realised that with some cuts and some overlay of samples it would be possible to create a focused version, that still had an expansive, calm/charged pace – and which, through overlay, cuts, and cleaning-up of the sound quality, would be at a much higher overall level.
Around two years earlier Aled Rees (sound technican and composer from the original version) had told me that he had embarked on the process of removing the distorted peaks from the piece, and that he had got through a large proportion of these sound-quality changes.
I asked Aled to be the sound technician for the edits I had decided on, and asked if he would be able to complete the process of removing the distorted peaks, and other glitches, from the piece. And then we realised we could use voice extraction from the original version to help with creating samples for overlay back onto the piece.
I feel that this is now a piece which follows the upward line—builds the plane of connections—in a far more consistent way, so that what is good about individual parts is intensified by what is around it. And it is a lot more polished at the levels of sound and of issues arising from rapid—sometimes single-take—recording of readings and performances.
One effect of the focusing of the piece is that it becomes more apparent to the listener that a main element of it is an abstract and oneiric engagement with terrains of derelict buildings and with underwater and flooded spaces, and that these terrains and spaces have an impersonal quality of sunlit, planetary serenity, and simultaneously have an eerie aspect. It is also easier to notice that the piece is about an escape-path which leads away from the form of ordinary, collapsed reality that is specific to capitalism. A question of turning sideways from chronic, chronological time and of travelling into the Futures, one after another, which were always alongside you.
In setting out along the escape-path you find that art and philosophy become processes of creating maps, diagrams, catalysts, compasses—and lenses.
I am certain that Mark would have seen this version of londonunderlondon as a more effective form of the initial lens.
*
Composition and editing: Justin Barton and Mark Fisher
Original music, sound technician: Aled Rees.
‘necropolis now’ written by Mark Fisher. ‘when space breaks ppen’ written by Justin Barton.
transmission:londonunderlondon is playing on NTS Radio on 15 October.
Sample from Sapphire and Steel:
See-saw sacradown What is the way to London town? One foot up and the other foot down That is the way to London town.
‘The Quiet Man’, 1980 story by John Foxx, quoted in its entirety.
[Precursor phrases from concluding section of the piece, ‘when space breaks open’]
Quotations from The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
Quotations from The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Sampled quotation from The War of the Worlds, H.G.Wells
(Necropolis Now)
Vampires may start out in Rumania or Egypt, but they always end up in London.
Marx saw that, as in the gaslit setting of the British Museum library, he laboured tirelessly on his interminable steampunk survey of the body of SF capital. ‘Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.’
The task Marx sets himself is no less than to diagnose and cure a planetary geotrauma that began in London five hundred years ago.
Apocalypse is always now, and Marx is trying to cut his way out of the pre-sent. If he can’t break the time lines, the future will be nothing but more of the same. The endless end, global subordination to Kapital’s idiot cyber-telos. ‘Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.’
Marx writes from the very epicentre of the ongoing catastrophe, the site where the Kapital Artificial Intelligence-Parasite, made up of ‘numerous mechanical and intellectual organs’, first crash-landed on earth. Since then, using the factory-farmed population of the city to provide the ‘mere conscious linkages’ it lacks, Kapital has itself become the solution to the perennial problem all Gothic entities face: how does what has never been alive reproduce?
It uses your eyes and ears, your fingers, your brain…
‘By virtue of it being value, [Kapital] has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.’
Approach from West India Quay and see what corpses have sprouted on the Isle of the Dead….
Barclays – HSBC – Bank of America – Citigroup –
Kapital mausoleums, freezer-white canyons of Finance ICE, pointing like rigor mortis fingers into the greyish purple of the light-polluted helicopter sky. Necropolitical takeover of the docks, both functionally and spatially. No need for ships to provide global communications now.
(I had not thought that death had undone so many).
Virtual Ground Zero. If they struck surely it would be here…
Here, where everything is already dead…
In Cabot Square, descend through the mock-deco hallways into the migraine hyperbright no-wonderland of the retail arcades.
The eternal noon of the living dead.
‘I had not thought that death had undone so many’
And Saturday night in the City is always dead. The high rise reptiles have slunk back into their lairs.
Finance vampires hunt by day.
And I too have been one of the dead. Duplicates have used my name while the alien parasite entity squats behind my eyes. (‘Marks of weakness, Marks of woe’).
Down into the tube, hanging like a slab of Bacon in the zombie meat trucks.
(‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge…’).
The underground is a stalking zone of shambling automata.
You know this in your dreams, and in what London dreams, in the fictions it breeds. That is why the London flood barrier against the Real has had a spectacular record of failure. They were looking in the wrong places. The incursion has already happened, many times. Fictions about invasion are already invasions.
As he completes Moses and Monotheism in exile in Hampstead, Freud can see what Nigel Kneale can later see: What you inherit from your parents is death.
You come to be in a mortifying structure that precedes you. You only have a lifetime to escape.
In the London Underground, Quatermass unearths parasites far more ancient than any Marx described. Kneale poses the same question as Wells, but differently: will earth become the second dead planet of the Martians?
For Wells, the Martians that invade London from Surrey-side are extra-terrestrial pirates giving the British imperium a taste of its own medicine.
But Professor Quatermass the metapsychologist can see that there was no human life that preceded the arrival of the myrmidons of death. The discovery he makes in Hobbs End is archaeopsychic horror: human beings were only ever the carrier-bodies for the alien death drive. There is no inside, and everything in your dream home is already owned by the parasites.
That is why it isn’t only traumatic fixation that compels Londoners to keep dreaming of invasion. Something else getting in would also be something in you getting out. Destruction of the World is also flight from the strata, from the catacomb of home, tomb of the cybermen…
The TV orphans whose electronic spines tingled to Delia Derbyshire’s Dr Who theme knew this as soon as they heard it in 1963. The uncanny is always the untimely. Delia Derbyshire is no more bound to her own time than Marx or Quatermass were denizens of theirs. On the contrary, cutting up present time in the Radiophonic Workshop’s lab in Maida Vale, she is a nomad of the time streams.
‘She used concrete sources and sine- and square-wave oscillators, tuning the results, filtering and treating, cutting so that the joins were seamless, combining sound on individual tape recorders, re-recording the results, and repeating the process, over and over again.’
Television was the unhomely vortex around which the 1960s British domestic scene was organised, the Chinese box display unit opening out the so-called interior onto the media landscape. The wired kids who watched, entranced, had consumed the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs with their breastmilk.
They know that terror is the name for the new, and they hear in Derbyshire’s sonic construction – broadcast for the first time the day after Kennedy’s exploding head had inaugurated the sixties’ atrocity exhibition – a presentiment of the decade’s megaviolence.
But they hear something else in the Radiophonic Workshop’s Audio Uncanny, which, never center-stage in the rock Spectacle, nevertheless quickly becomes unobtrusively ubiquitous.
An alternative Now builds itself out of radio station idents and incidental music. Ear worms breed the hunger for a space in which they can propagate, out beyond the pleasure principle, on the strobing plateaus of the dancefloor…
(when space breaks open)
[The event being described: A very large disused warehouse in early summer. Near docks. It has been squatted for a week for parties and as a temporary place to live. 11 floors. The weather has been very warm for the middle of May.]
[First voice].
‘It was in this really big warehouse, it was gigantic. It was near the docks … near one of the old dock basins. It was 11 floors. There was a party on the Saturday and Sunday, and then people just stayed, and other people arrived. Doing stuff, music, paintings on the walls, lots of stuff. A woman did this string sculpture that you could walk around in, lit up with ultra-violet light. Somehow it kept going for a week. It was this perfect week of hot weather. Kind of … different groups living on different floors. Sitting in the sun on the roof. There were these amazing views across the city, and you could see the hills in the distance. And the stars at night, with fantastic music going on…’ ‘It was kind of special, and it just built and built on itself, day after day.’
‘I remember the last day in the morning I found this graffiti on a wall. It said
When space breaks open Time turns sideways
[as if picking up the thread again] …the last day everything was amazing. We were on the roof most of the time at the beginning. You could see … forever, and the music… [unfinished sentence, as if trying to find words]. I remember thinking that what the people on the 8th floor were doing was fantastic. They were all singing long notes together – like overtone singing—and improvising songs, and some of them were singing rhythyms , and drumming on different things. But as it went on into the evening it became more intense—kind of much more beautiful and much more weird at the same time, as if they’d all been carried away by it to something else. There was a real sense of humour about them. There was a man who I’d spoken to a lot, who kept on joking, and coming up with bizarre, crazy ideas. And there was this very friendly woman, with unbelievably intense eyes. I started off thinking they were a bit like … situationists, you know? But at the end it was as if they knew something, as if they were onto something.
I heard someone saying they’d looked through a window, and it had looked like a different time—London at the time of the fire, London before the fire.
[as if she has described attempts to see things that failed]. But then, later, when I looked through a window, when I wasn’t really thinking … the street outside had gaslights – there was a row of gaslights. And there were ships in the docks with masts, wide … you know, with big keels, not that big, but like they were 19th century. There were braziers burning by the dock, but there was no-one there. Then the time afterwards… it was like a flash… I don’t know … but it was very clear. It was very early morning, and there was a cluster of small houses with carved wooden door frames. It looked pre-Roman, yes, pre-Roman – trees and the river and hills in the distance. Sleeping horses. There was a fire, and a woman in a blue dress standing looking back at me.
A man I met said he saw buildings that had weird shapes – and they changed their colours. He said it changed and became really crazy. But he didn’t tell me what he saw.
[Second voice]
What did I see? It was as if the ground and the buildings were there, but as if they were… not solid, insubstantial. There was… this immense space of hollow tentacles … [pause] …tube-tentacles … and they had coloured lights – or creatures made of light – moving through them, pulsing through them. And some of them had … openings at the end. Like mouths, like… interfaces. There was a tentacle that went through the building and had an opening by the stairs, off twenty feet away to my right. There were creatures coming through it, then hovering away, like birds, or huge brightly coloured moths, moth creatures. It was so… vast. Incredibly beautiful, but like it was all deep in an ocean. An ocean filled with strange – nexuses? … nexuses, and tentacles filled with brightly coloured lights. And London was somehow stretched through it.
There was another opening at the far end of the room. I walked through rooms to get to it, but there were people there, and I forgot… At one point I closed my eyes, and then I remembered about the opening. Then, something tapped my leg, hard. I jumped. There was nothing there. For a while I was so terrified, really terrified. But I started having all these strange memories of places from when I was a lot younger. I thought this the other day. It was as if they were flashes of times … when I’d had flashes of things being more intense, more alive.
[Third voice]
Refrains, incantations … Refrains are more powerful than people think. They open doors. What we see through the door, what comes through the door – maybe we often see it as something else … as something familiar but strange. We think it has happened several times before. That bizarre Blake letter. As if London somehow builds up a charge, and then somewhere it discharges. City lightning. And there is always time-displacement, time-bleed. Ballard. Virginia Woolf. HG Wells and his time machine. The past is something different. It’s a stack of depthworlds reaching down. Biopsychic memory. The memory of the earth. The future has been there all along, but changing. The future is part of the present, it’s space at higher and higher levels of intensity. The futures are nextdoor. A space of Nows, one after another. This is the best we can do at these levels of Energy. Increase the energy, you get the future.
Simultaneous reprise from ‘when space breaks open’ and ‘The Quiet Man’.
Reprise from ‘when space breaks open’.