Bittern space, a siskin.

Between 2013 and 2015 I published three short books concerned with sound, listening, and…

try i bark was written in Mooste, Estonia; wild horses think of nothing else the sea, whilst walking the welsh coast; and Yew Grotesque, as I walked in and around Grizedale Forest in Cumbria. I consider the three books to be a species of triangle, a series of de-centred perspectives that behave in waveforms.

Each book acts like a knot of the other in a spawn of its own accords.

try i bark is something of an outside, akin to a heard poem; wild horses… is more of an internal artefact, a slow mapping of fluctuating expanse; Yew Grotesque, the third publication, holds up a mirror to their echoes.

Composition spins like a wheel of place, sending and receiving signals in a fog of form and content.

Bittern space, a siskin is an attempt to transform parts of these books into relations of audition, to extract elements of sound from them in the guise of listening's multiplicitous qualities and the myriad modalities of writing. This is a process that can perhaps be likened to carpentry, planing the lines framed by the dimensions of the page, picking shavings up off the floor, endlessly arranging them into trivial giants.

Writing about the writing of sound and listening can relate as the concurrent creation and destruction of perspective and memory. Bittern space… is not an attempt to make less legible meanings of sounds legible. Likewise, it does not seek to make them even less legible than they seem to be. It follows that it is not an attempt to clarify what I think I mean, in a singular sense, when I attempt to write listening. I have no desire to fold a concrete relation between sound and text. I am not even sure that listening can be written.

The reflections of the texts herein correspond to processes of speculative listening and remain, as far as possible, incredulous to the origins and destinations of reception.