“Go back. What was must never be”—Alan Garner, Thursbitch, 2003

“Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow”—David Bowie, Life on Mars?, 1971

“Never mind about the Russians. Mr. Gridley has become much more of a menace”—Franklyn Ambruster in The Notorius Landlady, 1962

On October 27th, 1962, my father grabbed a few possessions, my mother and myself, piled us into the car and we set off for Cheddar Gorge, a journey of around 170 miles. Back to the cave.

The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred between 16th Oct 1962 – 29th Oct 1962, shortly after The Notorious Landlady was released.

Everything is undergoing some form of displacement: we know this, but we often resist it. Perhaps the unending procession of human displacement through war and/or ecocide shades our understanding; possibly our own mortal journey is something we try not to think about. However, as with a loose tile teetering on the roof of an abandoned homestead, ignoring it and allowing water to seep into the structure might well result in a huge displacement over time. When I developed DisplacementActivities, as a method, it was an attempt to engage directly with things I was either advised, or chose, to ignore. Starting with that loose tile, perhaps. Aside from the more spectacular examples featured daily in the news, Displacements often operate like unseen atoms and molecules colliding with particles that we can see in Brownian Motion. The random walks of visible particles may be explained by sub-microscopic nudging. If we follow this sideways into mystical realms in our search for Deep Inner Peace and Stillness, we might become aware of a sudden temporary absence of DisplacementActivities—where nothing seems to be displacing anything else at all. Pretty shocking for the unitiated. Earlier on we may have noticed the whirring of the air conditioning system falling silent when we weren’t actually aware of the sound it was making beforehand. The sound only came into being for us when it ceased. In the sound world, this phenomenon is called ‘remanence’ (Jean-François Augoyard, 2005). Aside from the odd perceived lacuna, Displacements are pretty much a constant in and on every level. Thus, methods of DisplacementActivities emerge as a form of knowing, more precisely unknowing, as I have argued elsewhere.

Pursuing this approach, my main modes of practice oscillate between sound, text and performance. These modes are often combined, glued together by images or symbols. Alongside this, walking is a constant and productive inspiration. Around 1999, I began to focus on location-based ambulant sound as a form of memory, and this began to shape a lot of my subsequent activity. Examples of this work are my series of DisplacementActivities, a form of trans-locational performance, and related work more recently on Sounds of Teotihuacan, a calmer form of GPS-based acoustic archaeology with Adje Both. The latest ongoing experiment along these lines, is literally along lines: The Barrow Alignment, which traces lines to and from Barrow Park in relation to the declination of magnetic north, collaborating with Jonathan Lindh and sponsored by Full of Noises(FoN). Watch this space… update here!

A key aspect of sound is its ability to penetrate deeply while remaining fleeting. Periodic ritual walking echoes this quality by heightening our awareness of Deep Time as an infinitesimal process experienced constantly yet seldom noticed. Ultimately, an openness to small variations within a vast ongoing improvisation is all that is necessary. Listen, and ye shall find!

Politics is most likely immanent in any art form, but particularly in one that engages with boundaries and edges, improvising freely with both human and non-human forms of obstruction. Tiny movements have the potential to be revolutionary—persistence of direction pervading through oscillation, akin to Henri Lefebvre’s ‘moments’. In a world where so many are compelled to move, any alignment with the human flow is plainly political. Otherwise, we end up in a ‘Don’t mention the war’ situation, already satirised hilariously by Cleese and Booth in Fawlty Towers, back in the 1970s . Times have moved on, or are we simply sliding backwards? What would backwards amount to? A hill of beans next to a loose tile? Perhaps this diagram holds the key:

I have a vague recollection that there was an incident involving a sudden trip to my grandparents in Yeovil. I remember a sense of good-humoured panic. I think it was the first time I’d ever been to Cheddar Gorge. I only understood the full extent of DisplcementActivities at work many years later, when my father told me about the terrible precarity of the Cuban Missile Crisis that day, and his motivations for urgent action. It was one of those vanishingly few occasions when I looked upon him with a deep feeling of pride.

vimeo: simon bradley
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collaborations:
vimeo: ArtCouple
bandcamp: ESS<>GEE