3.

Dehiscence, coupled with autophony–a condition, like Ovid’s Echo, that will
Play gorse pod recording throughout.
In 2010 I went on a field recording trip to the Isle of Grain on the Hoo
Peninsula, just north of Rochester. I was hoping to filter the hum of the
ubiquitous power stations through the conductive ecotone of the Medway; to
hear the bright, night time solitudes of herons in the trees, squealing like vervet
monkeys. Microphones straining after tiny sensations, the pondweed and the
marsh frogs, as if they were phantoms in the ear.
As I was walking around Cliffe Pools on the western side of the peninsula, the
sun had seized hold of the air and wouldn’t let it go. Amidst this thickness I
heard a sound that was like a thousand tiny explosions in the face. I was in a
kind of accidental harmony with the environment around me.
Walking into the bushes with the microphone, I realised that the myriad gorse
pods were popping, displaying what’s known botanically as dehiscence, the
splitting along a built in line of weakness of a plant structure in order to release
its contents. They were casting seeds from their yellow berths high into the air.
A residua transported in the beaks of birds, under the feet of walkers and in
the clomp of livestock. Having seized hold of sound, we have trouble letting
it go.
flick any sound back inside me if it’s pitched louder than the muttering of a
dove–means that I can hear my voice rattling between the splintered bones
that are always trying to pull themselves apart, that my pulse irradiates any
quiescence, that I can hear my eyes move in my ear.
I as much see as hear sound.
My body is a place of conductive hypercusis, intensely sensitive to sound and
its effects on my balance. Energy is admitted more acutely through bone than
air, and I find that I often have to shut my eyes in order to protect my ear. The
yellow spot drifting from the middle of the retina. This is not just an auditory
condition, even though we may say the violence is ‘located’ there.
Sometimes the world is only a shimmering aroma, a sort of oblique
bewilderment. The body splits and scars as billions of biochemical spores
and skins release their contents, a coagulation of heat which grips the entire
surface of the skull. When the body will not remain silent, does it sense its
own predation, is it feeding on its own decay? Is this sound that comes from
something other than vibration? In an instant, innumerable larval ears contract
their muscles and disperse throughout the body as if it were a drop of water.

Three years ago I flew to Japan to perform at the Ftarri Festival. A week or
so after returning home I ran to catch a bus and everything came to a halt. I
burst, the semicircular canal, in essence, a comparable a line of weakness, was
releasing its contents. My dead ear was listening to its own decay.

The third window is a hole that tricks the skull, a pit in which neurons are
burnt alive. When exposed to loud sound, the canal, in alchemical autopsy,
transmutates one element into another. The head, still, rotates. The canal,
burning, evaporates. The vestibular system generates a compensatory eye
movement as if the head were turning in place.