“Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow”—David Bowie, 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, myself and my mother, 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 that loose tile on the roof of the old homestead, denial could become a perilous option. 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. Displacements can operate like those unseen atoms and molecules colliding with the particles that we can see under a standard microscope. The random walks of the visible particles may be explained by sub-microscopic nudging—Brownian motion. 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 whatsoever. Quite 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 work more recent on Sounds of Teotihuacan, a calmer form of GPS-based acoustic archaeology. The latest 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.

Martin Shaw has referred to a ‘True North in my heart’ that appears to be a form of Deep Morality conjured from the depths of biological and geological time. Several exceptional artists discovered their True North early on in life, giving acute focus to their work from an early stage. Not quite so for me, although it was obvious that sound would be involved somehow, see here. I never really felt comfortable with the hypothetical boundaries between artforms, or anything else for that matter. I found myself drawn to edges and borders between disciplines, between jobs, between notes, where Displacements occur more frequently. I seem to have wobbled around Magnetic North for most of the time, but my navigational skills have improved a little since I worked out the difference between Magnetic and True North. To this end, experimental sound remains central, and a text such as this is probably drifting towards my Grid North. I’ll leave Shaw to his one ‘True North’.

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:

vimeo: simon bradley
insta/threads: @simonbrdly
bandcamp: simonbradley
collaborations:
vimeo: ArtCouple
bandcamp: ESS<>GEE