This is a past event
Drew Mulholland (University of Glasgow) will give the paper, Musical Psychogeography: The History and the Mystery of the Séance at Hobs Lane.
Musical Psychogeography: The History and the Mystery of the Séance at Hobs Lane
I would begin with an explanation of how the theory and practice of psychogeography influenced the writing of both "The Séance at Hobs Lane" and more recently "The Norwood Variations". " Séance..." was an album that dealt with the notion that music, sound and the exploration of landscape can involuntarily trigger memory. In the early 1970¹s the inorganic chemist Donald Robbins claimed that specific minerals had the capacity to store information, he believed as did others on the ³Dragon Project² that studying the structure of these minerals may in time lead to an understanding of imagery encoded in stone. The archaeologist and visionary T.C. Lethbridge also believed that events could be ³tape recorded² into the specific area where they happened, creating a endless memory loop for those tuning in an idea that Nigel Kneale explored in both The Stone Tape (BBC 1972) and earlier in Quatermass and the Pit (BBC 1958). There is a great tradition that regards walking as an intregal part of creativity, Rousseau writes his last great work on "Reveries of the Solitary Walker", Wordsworth walks on average ten miles a day, Emmanuel Kant's constitutionals were so regular that his neighbours literally set their clocks by them. I would describe how composers Holst, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, John Ireland, Peter Warlock and writers Thomas De Quincey, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James were highly influenced by particular landscapes and how creative expression weaves in and out of the idea of place.
"An extraordinary recording. The Seance at Hobs Lane appears to be a psychogeographical investigation of subterranean London" K. J. Donnelly in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (OUP 2013)
"...the putative godfather of current experiments in British musical psychogeography" The Guardian
"I don't know if it's art or there's something wrong with the record" John Peel
- Speaker
- Drew Mulholland
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, Room 055