{"id":14315,"date":"2024-07-16T14:26:13","date_gmt":"2024-07-16T13:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/?post_type=product&#038;p=14315"},"modified":"2026-04-16T16:25:45","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T15:25:45","slug":"by-the-north-sea","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/product\/by-the-north-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"By the North Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Flatlines FLAT003 CD of Robin Mackay\u2019s audio essay <a href=\"https:\/\/flatlines-hyperdub.bandcamp.com\/album\/by-the-north-sea\"><em>By the North Sea<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The CD comes housed in 48-page hardback casebound sleeve containing the text from the audio essay.<\/p>\n<p>Following on from Mark Fisher &amp; Justin Barton\u2019s \u2018On Vanishing Land\u2019 and Kode9\u2019s \u2018Astro-Darien\u2019, the third release on Flatline Records, Hyperdub\u2019s sub label for audio essays and sonic fiction, is &#8216;By the North Sea&#8217; by Robin Mackay, philosopher and founder of the UK publisher Urbanomic.<\/p>\n<p>The project is a sonic exploration of the perplexities of time, disappearance, and loss, channelled through the fictions of H.P. Lovecraft, the speculative mythos of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), and the ghost of Dunwich\u2014a once prosperous English trading city now lost almost wholly to the sea.<\/p>\n<p>Described by Mackay as a \u2018radio play afflicted by ontological rot\u2019, the audio essay interweaves field recordings, recovered video footage, voice performance, and original music. The voices of Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, actors Peter Marinker and Phyllida Nash, Angus Carlyle, Lisa Blanning, diver Stuart Bacon, and Morgan Caines of Dunwich Museum, loop and twist around Mackay\u2019s narration in a dense, multi-levelled sonic hyperstition that lends itself to repeated listening.<\/p>\n<p>Mackay began writing By the North Sea in 2017 in the week immediately following the death of Mark Fisher, returning to the archives of a project that he and Mark had embarked upon in 2001, with the themes of the original \u2018Dunwich Project\u2019 taking on a new character in the wake of Fisher\u2019s death, and becoming a device for asking questions about finality, about things that could now never happen, about the possibility of continuing, and about a distanced friendship marked by depressive absences and constantly deferred promises to spend time together.<\/p>\n<p>The \u2018definitively unfinished\u2019 version of a project that does not, has not, and never will exist, By The North Sea tells of the search for a mode of time where nothing passes definitively and everything can, with the correct procedures, be accessed, resynthesised, and recast. In a series of resonating narratives across different moments in time (1949, 1968, 2001, 2017), characters including anthropologist Echidna Stillwell, time-travelling professor Randolph Templeton, Lovecraft, and Fisher and Mackay themselves emerge and are submerged in turn, swirling continually around the conceptual figure of Dunwich, as their search takes on the character of a repetition compulsion\u2013a collective return to the site of an impersonal trauma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14316,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[1604],"product_tag":[2054,1748,2053,2060,2055,2059,1684,1685,2057,1691,2058,2056],"class_list":["post-14315","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-special-projects-and-editions","product_tag-audio-essay","product_tag-ccru","product_tag-cd","product_tag-dunwich","product_tag-echidna-stillwell","product_tag-mark-fisher","product_tag-music","product_tag-sound","product_tag-templexity","product_tag-time","product_tag-trauma","product_tag-voice","first","instock","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/14315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=14315"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=14315"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=14315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}