Functional Sounds Conference, Berlin

Functional Sounds

http://soundstudies.eu/2013conference

1^st Conference of

European Sound Studies Association

Humboldt University, Berlin, 4-6 October 2013

Day One - four of many speakers at this eclectic conference of the newly formed ESSA.

First keynote, "Earth's functional sounds" from Douglas Kahn

(National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW, Australia)

sets the scene for an eclectic cross-disciplinary discussion on Functional Sound,

its reading, writing, emplacement,

significative or narrative role in explaining space and time and

uses from the political to torture, story-telling and cultural ecology.

"With the nineteenth century advent of modern telecommunication technologies,

noise and odd little sounds, some of them musical, existed alongside

the conversations and information exchanges of communications.

Many were considered to be interference but others were recognised as

the sound and music of a new nature, an electromagnetic one,

the knowledge of which also evolved significantly with the nineteenth century. . . . 

Instead of a default Olympian gaze, this talk will present only

the smallest sonic breaches in the ideal,

veritable Pythagorean commas in communications dreams of a

complete annihilation of space and time, as they have been engaged in the arts.

Commas in music, after all, were an adaptation to the noise of the real."

Frauke Behrendt (University of Brighton) spoke entertainingly on

“Making Cycling Sound(s)”: bicycles own sounds and 'political' uses of

air horns like those of lorries (which cause 50% of UK cyclist road deaths).

I wonder how placing cone horns and compressed air tanks

on an adapted bicycle (now capable of 178 decibels) will persuade

truck drivers to stop killing cyclists and if the biggest,

most dangerous machines on the roads are only killing half of the

cyclists who die, what unforgivable idiocy and neglect

of fundamental duties to good sense are causing the other half?

The talk moves into more fecund, more sonic territory, where

elements of designed environmental sound are considered:

these may be individual or collective.

They may have social, political or artistic motives.

By contrast to the usual practice of creating sound in spaces -

"designing sound in"- they may also constitute cancellation

or removal of sound - "designing sound out"

to create "privatised listening environments" with headphones.

Or using sound as a controller of spaces and their users:

programme music used to code a space,

making it unattractive to non-consumers. (Stern)

see Frauke Behrendt:  "The Sound of Locative Music", Convergence 18 (3)

Anette Vandso (University of Aarhus) gave a wide-ranging talk

with excellent examples on "Political Potentials of Sound Art"

How does sound art permit and/or lead us to

    - Explore   - Interrogate   - Intervene    

in a political and/or social context?

Where the designed-in exclusion of sound exteriority was

breached by importing 'noise' sounds, this was, in its earliest stages,

a highly subversive and resonant act:

permissive of a hitherto absolute aesthetic and political taboo.

Luigi Russolo called the concert hall a

"hospital for anaemic sound" (Art of Noise, 1913)

It is increasingly hard to imagine living and working in this cultural situation.

The shift from music to noise-sounds invites and

incites a new democratisation of sound communication.

Some political potentials of sound art identified by Vandso

    - Participation     - Representation/aesthetic indeterminacy    

- Eventness/Becoming                 - Power/Control

Examples discussed/shown:

*            Hom Kai Wang (2010)            "Music While We Work"

            Taiwan Pavilion, Venice Biennale

*            Yu Hsien Su (2010)            "Sound of Nothing"

            Taiwan Pavilion, Venice Biennale

*            Anke Eckhardt (2010)

            "Between You and Me is a Wall of Sound"

*            Dick Higgins:            Danger Music No. 17 (1962)

            A musical score containing only instructions to the performer to scream.

Mark Grimshaw (University of Aalborg) presents

"Living between the virtual and real worlds"

- prefacing the talk with the warning that

since committing to the title some months previously,

his thinking has moved on - he challenges the

accepted distinctions between, asking whether

listening to any recorded sound is not a virtual experience.

Phonomnesis, remenances, other auditory illusions.

Problems with definitions of sound as either wave, event or perception of event,

the cross-functionality of senses, being at once autonomic, perceptual and affective.

The perception of having perceived sound can after all be obtained from other senses 

than hearing: the cochlear implant converts acoustic signals to electrical energy 

which stimulates the cochlea.

The sound itself is therefore no longer being perceived….

The animated pub discussion that follows with

Kevin Logan (http://theearoftheduck.wordpress.com) and

Fergus Kelly ((http://livecomposition.wordpress.com)

sees us trying to formulate our own distinct positions on a 

continuum between these ostensible poles of "live" and "virtual".

Kevin is the most extreme, arguing that all live listening being mediated by

memory and associative reference, only first encounter with the 

entirely alien can be said not to have elements of virtuality.

Grimshaw also touches on Game Transfer Phenomena (Gortari, Aaronson, Griffiths, 2011, International Journal of Cyber Behaviour, Psychology and Learning), characterised by 

(1) delayed release of immersion on returning to the physical environment and 

(2) temporary obscuring on returning to physical environment of distinctions 

between reality and virtuality.

GTP is based on studies of actions - is game sound different?

Action/behaviour transfer has palpable consequences whereas sound or perception 

transfer need not and is less easily quantified.

That sound is both perceptual and virtual was touched upon, the distinction 

between virtual and real only relating perhaps to the sound's provenance.

Environment, memory and affect arguably essential to comprehensive definitions of sound.

Treating sound as potential, as virtuality can engender new approaches.

Bio-feedback for user-centric sound design development: EMR, ECG, etc

Direct Brain-To-Brain communications in humans?

A pilot study (video shown) at

University of Washington, Seattle, August 2013 (NSL with CDDL).

Literally mind-blowing.

Conversion of user 1's deterministic thought patterns send

guiding signal to user 2, who presses a keyboard button:

It was unclear whether the required information was for

User 2 to hit the target or the correct time to press the trigger -

Anyway, whoops and hollers came from the young geeks as

User 2 consistently appeared to act correctly on receiving telepathic instruction.

  

Situated cognition, argues MG

primarily comprises

*            one or more continual feedback loops

*            between stimuli in the environment as perceived and

*            responses to subsequently experienced sense of

*            cumulative context of that which has already occurred or been perceived to occur

I would add that augmentation of the environment,

specifically in situated listening that blends real with virtual

necessarily makes recognition of those feedback loops impossible.

WIthout blurring of the two, no augmentation can be achieved.

Arguably, memory can also be tricked, in this context,

to re-identification of familiar as new, new as repetitive, other combinations:

not just loops but all manner of cognitive shapes can be made

to appear momentarily, like hallucinatory audible bubbles,

before vanishing upwards into the sky.

On the delight and confusion of foreign cities. Sound, smell and sausage.

In my previous post I omitted to mention that yesterday, 3rd October, was the 24th anniversary of the Reunification of Germany. 

I only found this out because on continuing to search for a map of the city and a phrase book to replace my ancient Berlitz German for Travellers, I ended up buying postcards and asking the shop lady why everything was shut and the whole city was out drinking beer on the street.

Her explanation in delightful, impeccable English made me mildly ashamed, to have almost no German and not to have known the enormous significance of the date. 

I'd always placed the date somewhere in September, coming as it did quite soon after the fall of the communist government of Czechoslovakia, where I had been on tour with the Merseyside Youth Orchestra only weeks before. 

I had traded chewing gum for bottles of beer and a five pound note for two bottles of Czech wine and a crate of 24 beers which I sold to mates on the coach. It kept me in spends for days. 

I had photographed a police car chase and arrest below my Prague hotel balcony, the driver spread-eagled and searched in an apparently random but violent arrest. 

He later returned and could be seen somewhat strangely standing on the same spot below, waiting, no car to be seen. 

Everything was painted a peeling dark green. The crumbling stone buildings were reinforced with wooden scaffolding, street after street. Grocery shops with near empty shelves had silent, forlorn queues around the block. 

Our orchestra played to a near empty stadium with a government minder sitting alone in a sea of empty seats. Men looked over newspapers long and hard in hotel lobbies (I'm not kidding, they were everywhere we went!). 

Those small and vicarious memories are the only ones I can really use to visualise what life in East Berlin might have been like, until I was a healthy, free young adult. 

People were still trying to escape across electrified railway lines under gunfire to make it from the street on which I stayed last night to the adjacent one, miraculously inside the "free" world, just the other side of the tracks from FriedrichStrasse Station. 

Incidentally, that was the only way in and out of East Berlin from the West side of the city and workers under heavy guard and security checks made the stressful daily commute into but never out of the Eastern city. 

When I was young, plump and free,

this wall divided a city in two.

Plump and free: Or Not.

Now only fragments of wall remain as consciously retained reminders of this very recent brutal, crushing existence. I expect that many of the people I see around (although with the influx of aspiring fashionistas from around the globe they are surely a minority now) lived with the daily terror of the secret police, shortages of everything, poverty, surveillance and compulsory obedience to party dogma, spied on by paranoid neighbours, in fear and squalid lack of the rights, lifestyle, health and basic freedoms that their fellow citizens were enjoying across a concrete wall. 

I asked the shop lady what people were doing to celebrate Reunification Day. "Just drinking beer, I think" she said. "Or working, like me" she added with a laugh. 

"Anyway, it doesn't mean anything to me. I was in the States back then." It was striking from our single short interview on the subject how blithely many assumed the wholeness, the unity of the city to be. 

It was after all only 28 years out of a near millennium of the city's existence - at least, of the communities that now form it. 

Actually I was surprised to read that it was only in 1920, with the Greater Berlin Act that the city in its current form came to exist. Charlottenburg, Köpenick and Spandau from the Province of Brandenburg were incorporated into the city, doubling Berlin's population overnight from about 2 to nearly 4 million inhabitants.

It has its origins in the thirteenth century and was of course the capital for centuries of old Prussia, of Unified Germany, of the Weimar Republic formed after the revolution that removed the monarchy at the end of World War 1.

The quest to update my phrasebook was urgent because of the unshakeable memory of having relied on a 1950s Spanish "language tutor" on going to Barcelona around a decade ago. 

I faithfully reproduced the required "Por favor, donde esta el tocador de caballeros" (Literally: Where is the gentleman's dressing table, please?) trying to ask for the Gents.

Ending up miming a piss to a stranger in a bar, who merely shrugged and pointed, I vowed to update my language learning resources.

The German book in my possession allows me to learn such things as "No, I am travelling with my wife/husband/son/daughter. Can you direct us to a reputable night club?" 

There is a whole chapter on tobacconists but neither the chuffing glossary nor a single page in the book that I skimmed in increasing annoyance would give me the urgently required word "MAP". 

The postcard shop lady directed me further along my route and I walked out into bright sun, noisy roadworks, enormous pile drivers sinking concrete and steel columns into the highway, moustachioed or pony-tailed folk in hiking jackets walking in groups in all directions, impassive with faintly disapproving looks. 

Tears of confused exultant happiness rose up as I remembered long ago sunny moments of hope, excited anticipation or just the joy of floating free in some foreign city, free to watch, absorb, listen, smell. 

The Cuban maniac on the bridge to Île de la Cité in Paris, proclaiming Castro the new Christ while slobbering down a broken flute. 

Finding at last a phone box that worked to telephone the American girl I had fallen over in front of, the previous day in Shakespeare and Co, the bookshop that finally agreed to publish Joyce's Ulysses (the predecessor of the then incumbent).

Pausing at the mini bit (a few doors down form the main place) of  Ganymed wine bar by the river Spree, watching wide flat river tour boats and elegantly dressed couples, I ordered beer, black pudding and sauerkraut. 

I forgot all previous thoughts, listened to 60's French pop (a favourite musical delicacy, in small quantities) and waited keenly for food. 

When only mustard had been forthcoming after around half an hour (and not enough for a meal, should the fast-approaching madness take me) my anticipation turned slightly more tetchy.

On arrival, the steaming skillet was a happy sight, lifting my tired soul with renewed anticipation. 

At first glance it was particularly the soft, large buttery potatoes in an apparent chicken stock that seemed most inviting.

Sauerkraut and black pudding looked good, piled artistically on top, crowned with watercress.

Just for a rough idea

The hungry man is capable of a weeping, howling, disappointment almost like no other. 

When I discovered that the black pudding had been boiled, I nearly cried out and ran from the establishment. 

It would not have been hard, from an eight by sixteen foot room, albeit crammed with tables and chairs. 

My hunger and the inconvenience that a street chase would have entailed however got the better of me and I took the first plastic sack of blood and minced gut and split it open for a good look. 

It was after all the mustard that saved the occasion although had the waiter been less of the scurrying sort I would probably asked him to go and find me the pot. 

Eating this terrible invention took me back to my busking days in Paris, in '92. 

Sharing an awful tiny loft with Jean Marie de la Montagne, Thunderbird-lookalike, irascible, sentimental, Alsatian romantic with a voice of gold who I teamed up with to do a nightly set on the RER Ligne B from Denfert Rochereau to Paris Disney, performing the same guitar/voice/violin set in each direction a half dozen times a night.

Cooking that other terrible idea, the andouillette (tripe sausage) over a single tiny gas flame in his chambre de bonne ("maid's room") off the Champs Elysee (a thousand francs a month to live in one of the most expensive sectors of Paris, which I shared with him, alternating mattress and floor). 

We ate that piss-smelling rubber nightly for weeks and I shall never forget it. 

Lettuce makes the andouilette
like a beggar in borrowed robes

It was the only meat we could afford and in the early 90s it was still largely unthinkable, literally impossible to conceive for most people, that a meal might not contain some sort of flesh, however filthy a form it arrived in.

The mustard had started, I thought, to wink at me, like a prank that had come to life. When the awful dark wine blood sausages came, I thanked providence for the invention of mustard, of bread and of beer. 

Later, having eaten the entire dish of blood, pickled cabbage and potatoes (and those last were, really, very good indeed), I retired to my hotel for a short siesta.

On awaking, a new adventure awaited, having rediscovered my animus. 

I walked and walked and walked, observing the emergent future concrete and glass in its magnificent embryonic stages everywhere around, interspersed with the unsmiling Imperial grandeur of the Treaty of Berlin - not all those ones of the eighteenth century promising Anglo-German peace or tentatively recognising Eastern cousins' freedom from the Ottoman yoke, no. 

The one of 1885 that carved all those straight lines through Africa. That one's for another time.

In the evening I drank wine with a Swiss psychoanalyst.

Today I have been at the most extraordinary conference on Functional Sounds, at the European Sound Studies Association, about which I had meant to write earlier, before getting side-tracked.

More, shortly. 

Now it's time for a bier.

Heute, ich bin ein Berliner

Arriving by NastyJet at Berlin Schonefeld Airport, 25 miles south of the city (of course), I found a train into town and got off slightly randomly at the large interchange of Alexander Platz, with no clue how to get to the hotel or even where it was. I searched in vain for some time for a bookstore or news agents to buy a map.

The Platz had a vibrant winter-ish market selling a surprising array of lace, leather goods, tourist knick knacks, beer and sausage, funny pictures and hats. Well, the hats were sure funny.

Eventually I got back into the station and tried without success to find my hotel's address on a graffitied station map of the streets.

I thought at least proceeding further might help, not bothering about such detail as which direction I was travelling in, beaten up as usual by the Gatwick experience. 

(The compulsory binning of many of my toiletries in a lengthy, sullen interview that nearly caused me to miss the check-in, because the bottles were larger than 100mls; take-off delayed by half hour, chicken coop seat between sighing, snorting coughing man and student watching shooter movie on iPad; beer four quid for a warm mini-can).

It turned out I had got on the right line and train and that my random choice of descent was spot-on.

Things were looking up and before long I found the unexpectedly lovely Kunsthotel on LuisenStrasse which runs directly north of the station where I had descended, Friedrichstrasse.

An unpretentious mixture of bold and homely that Berlin seems to achieve so gracefully, of ancient charm and futuristic chic, the building straddles the very line of the wall whose destruction heralded the end of 28 years of brutal segregation between two opposed world political movements across the heart of a single city. 

In fact, one side of it was bricked and concreted over to prevent desperate Easterners gaining access and throwing themselves below onto the train tracks in a hopeless bid for the other side, sometimes jumping onto train roofs or scrambling amid gunfire across electrified tracks. 

It is barely possible to imagine this desolation of the spirit in such a place now. 

The eighteen foot ceilings and the trunks supporting the massive rustic wooden staircase surround a pointed weight, suspended seventy feet on an invisible wire, balanced perfectly at the centre spot. 

The halls are covered in impressionistic or erotic art and the communal bathroom I had so dreaded was in fact a super clean, large, light space with amazing showers. 

A giant smooth snake head looms at the over the lobby seats and the deep vine-draped courtyard is silent but for the rhythmic beat of swarming starlings far above.

Tomorrow, Friday 4th is the first day of the first conference of the European Sound Studies Association, "Functional Sounds", the reason for my return here, the first time not in a truck to move furniture up one of those courtyard staircases. Happy happy days!

I will report some of the speakers and ideas in my next post - looking forward so much to this!

My very first ever ever Radio show: not Steve Wright. "ROOM."

Hello folks, sorry to have been so long since adding to these pages, I know you've been busting for an update from my crazy escapades.

Well, good news is I've got a few posts coming in the next few days about all kinds of exciting stuff like GPS-led immersive soundwalks in Berlin,

the first ever conference of SoundStudies.EU, "Functional Sounds" from where I will be reporting each day for the next three days

and some of my own weird discoveries in the surprising and increasingly fascinating

Hampshire coastal town of Gosport,

where I have been making field recordings

First though, now it's no longer being broadcast, 

my show from September 2013, 

a reduced length, massively edited version, for headphones (or really lovely speakers) 

of a piece called "ROOM", made for the Hansard Art Gallery at the end of 2011. 

We used 14 speakers in four rooms and asked the audience to move around the space and explore. 

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In "ROOM" I took, as a starting point, 
Alvin Lucier's 1969 sound work 
"I am sitting in a room", 
developing ideas it suggests, 
but using a 21st century digital studio.

The original piece is based on 
the idea of a room's unique resonant characteristics 
gradually overwhelming the original recorded content, 
through playback and re-recording of the same initial sounds, 
again and again until no longer recognisable 
but transformed into a series of tones and pulses, 
the cadence of the spoken word 
gradually collapsed into a narrow band, 
like a dimly flickering flame.

The sounds of my own speaking voice (reading my own text) 
gradually become the 'instruments' of a virtual 'orchestra', 
in music that develops over time and across space, 
to simulate and distort reality in ways that are 
impossible in the physical dimensions.  

"Room" is an exploration of musical composition as 
the building of virtual physical structures which the listener may enter, 
taking changing routes to build shifting impressions of a sonic landscape.

Here is a reduction from physical to virtual space of the composition ROOM, 
which explored uses of the voice as a sound source 
whose 'meaning' or character was related to but distinct from 
any meaning imparted by the text.

As the text unravels, 
folds over itself, 
becomes truncated, looped, distorted and overlaid 
with itself and other sources, 
flashes of memory and premonition interfere, disrupt, distort. 

It is like a journey in an open car through a dark landscape, 
peopled with versions of the sensory world and 
the liminal spaces between 
'reality' and a sleeping reinvention of it.
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Imagine music you could enter and explore, or wear like an invisible atmosphere, 


the instruments and singing voices in the air about them like dust particles 
that dart and race in the sunlight or the heavenly bodies themselves, 
after millennia of straining, audible to human ears.

Consider the musical composition a physical object 
which if given spatial dimensions, 
you may enter and examine at will.

If words are only labels symbols for an idea of a thing, 
may they not also serve as musical notes, which are the same?

Is a sound any more or less meaningful than a word?  

What is its interaction with the space in which it is heard?

The relationships between 
   - the sound, 
   - the space in which it resonates and 
   - the imaginative associations of the listeners 
combine to create a wild thing that has no name, 
cannot be captured or described, 
is only experienced 
by one person, 
once. 

Isn't that a mystery beyond understanding?

If Futurism and Modernism are dead 
and post-Modernism still doesn't know exactly what it is, 
long live the ambiguous fecundity of the present.


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Alongside composing for classical instruments, I have worked 
first with tape recordings and 
latterly, with audio montage in the digital studio 
for eighteen years, in search specifically of two things.

Firstly, using the digital studio to create 
simulations of human performance 
in explorations of musical ideas that 
would be impossible for actual players to achieve.

Secondly, as a result of this, 
the creation of virtual environments within the sound 
that are transformed and juxtaposed, interwoven 
in ways that could not be achieved in the physical dimensions.  

I believe that sound is as richly potent an expressive form as the verbal lexicon, 
in and in spite of its conditioned associations and with its scope for 
extension, subversion, flexing, demolition and restructuring 
in the image of the wordless visions of hallucination and dreaming.

For this reason I have been exploring the simulation of acoustic environments in which 
the sound appears to be produced, 
just as film makers are concerned with finding and adapting location 
and theatre designers of creating perfect stage sets, 
tightly appropriate to the purpose of their narrative.

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Postcard from the Woods

Sunday, 11th August 2013, 4 pm
by the river, in front of The Anglers Arms, Bishopstoke SO50 6LQ


I was trying this morning, in my garden, to read Slavoj Zizek's "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously". Trying and somewhat failing to understand a Marxist interpretation of the current geo-political condition, I decided to get my spanners out, fix my half-ruined ancient bike and ride it somewhere far away.

Setting off along the river Itchen, a few yards from my new home, I followed its winding course upstream, through Riverside park, golden green and filled with ambling families, kayakers on the river. Swaythling, under the motorway and into fields.

Somewhere along the way, proceeding I knew not exactly where, other than roughly north, on a rutted, root-bobbled, woodland path, I started to hear a kind of work-song, a blues chant that built upon itself before shifting tangentially.

The route led out of the woods, alongside a barbed wire fence to a shit-piled, bumpy, furrowed pasture where riding was harder than walking. I got off and walked. I got lost, then stuck, at a dead end of fences and high grass.

Turning back, I saw two distant brightly coloured teeshirts, a couple resting under trees. As I approached to ask them the way I found they had vanished.

Near the spot where they had seemed to sit, I found a kissing gate, a cattle-gridded bridge and a steep gravel climb to a thronging play area, full of ice cream and grizzling toddlers.

A sort of piratical Nicholas Cage (many piercings and tattoos, resplendent greased quiff, expensive round, brown, gold-rimmed shades) directed me back the way I had come for the requested Itchen Navigation path.

So I took the other way, finally back to the ancient waterway after a five mile cowpat-deep detour.

The sun shines on my loneliness and fear, evaporating it with steady, unceasing action.

In my bag are raspberries and sausage rolls. The road ahead seems shorter than before.

I will take the train home from Winchester, apparently some 8 miles off and compile the Postcard from the Woods that I heard as I bounced through the wood.

[ I found this figure to be wildly optimistic, after three hours of sweating, clunking forwards but cannot offer an accurate alternative. Perhaps 14 or 16 more in all was closer to it ]


8 pm
Garden of South Western Arms, Adelaide Rd, Southampton SO17 2HW

My phone's map software reckons 13 miles from here (one yard from my house) to Winchester.

I reckon I rode 25, due to detours, back-tracking and the wildly meandering waterway woodland paths.

I didn't know the age of it, assuming C18th like most of our canals.

Therefore I was amazed at a plaque below Bishop's Bridge stating the Romans established the city in 70 AD and constructed the section of the navigation that runs there around that time, to prevent the river flooding. A huge engineering feat, in any age.

I remembered childhood picture books of anchored rafts with huge lead weights winched up wooden chutes as pile drivers for three men to wind and drop, hammering tree trunks into the bed of the Thames for platforms to build the first, wooden, London Bridge.

Approaching Winchester via Compton, pausing atop the bridge crossing the magnificent and shocking M3 motorway, then continuing up and down steep hills then suddenly across the top of a meadowy valley, the Victorian viaduct below, to which I then swooped and crossed.

Passing the 12th century Hospital of St Cross, its half-ruined enormity bespeaking the ancient humanitarian and self-organising power that the city always evokes as I enter it.

Cycling on the flat, through green woodland paths at the edge of the town walls, I circle Winchester College and regain the water's side, approaching Bishop's Bridge.

Stopping to eat sausage rolls and raspberries from my bag, I realise my legs are feeling very used, shaky and shocked.

I resolve to do this more and more, to see if I can pass hills as effortlessly again as all the lycra boys, always moving ahead like trains while I shuffle and grunt up a slope.

Up the High Street, under the statue of King Alfred, alongside a confusing cordon, turning out to be for an athletic event, a cycle race.

I feel both left out of a club and nonchalantly smug about my own petit tour.

If only lycra didn't make me look like a fish in a bag.

Last, thigh-burning, climb to the train station at the top of the town hill, buying a can of cider and a ticket, I discover the train to my new home's doorstep is five minutes away.

Blissful recline under the lowering sun's undiminished brilliance, I laugh to recall the sometimes desperate thoughts of perdition, of never arriving, of punctures and river tumbling on foot-wide sections of sloping mud that my ancient town bike handled like a husky.

Fabulous old rusty bike, thank you very much for a lovely day.

Here is the music I imagined, clunking and wobbling over the tiny rutted paths between cows watching and swans not, the eternal outflow of a thousand subterranean mouths, flickering sun dappling the water through swaying willow leaves, carpets of butterflies that scattered like fairies before my approaching wheel: