Resounding: An Interview with Drew Mulholland

Abstract

What follows is the edited and footnoted transcript of an interview with Drew Mulholland, Composer-in-Residence in the Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, conducted by Hayden Lorimer and Chris Philo. Themes are explored to do with the ‘geographical’ influences on Mulholland's performance and composition of music, and on his emerging ideas about what might be termed ‘musical’ or ‘sonic psychogeography’.

Key Words:

• Music and geography
• musical psychogeography
• sonic psychogeography

Acknowledgement

Big thanks to Allan Lafferty for transcribing the full interview.

Notes

¹A collection such as Carney (1987) very much writes about the geographies of music, while one such as Leyshon et al. (1998) carries a range of inquiries into the multiple intersections between place, music and identity.

²There are obviously many kinds of musican: professionals and amateurs; practitioners of countless different genres; ones playing highly localised ‘folk’ musics, others playing thoroughly globalised ‘world’ musics. All would doubtless detect different kinds of geographies shaping their composition, performance, hearing and learning of music(s).

³Examples include Wood et al., (2007) and Simpson (2008); also Laura Cameron co-hosting with Matt Rogalsky a networked performance of Alvin Lucier's 1970 composition ‘Quasimodo the Great Lover’ which engaged with bioacoustics, particularly the sounds of the humpback whale [http://www.mrogalsky.net/transnational].

⁴We choose the label after Quoniam's (1988) coining of the term ‘artist-geographer’.

⁵Their ‘writing’ or less-formal creating of musical pieces.

⁶Leverhulme Trust ‘Artist in Residence’ Grant No. F/00 179/AQ, awarded for the calendar year 2008; Drew has since continued his association with the Department as an Honorary Research Fellow with personal funding from the Scottish Arts Council to compose a piece, Geographia Mundi, which was performed at the Glasgow Department's Geography Centenary Alumni Day on 21 August, 2009.

⁷He has long been an established musician: since 1996, he has released seven albums and various singles, eps and tracks for compilations, has regularly collaborating with members of well-known bands (eg. Portishead, Isobel Campbell [Belle & Sebastian], Teenage Fanclub, Coil, Add N to X, and Spacemen 3), and has recorded sessions and interviews for Radios 1, 2 , 3 and 4 as well as BBC Scotland (radio and television).

⁸He secured a Wellcome Trust ‘Creative’ Grant to explore psychogeography based at Glasgow Caledonian University 2005–2006, his ambition being to do writing on psychogeographical theory and, more especially, practice (with the particular focus being psychogeographical tours through Glasgow).

⁹Psychogeography, as in the various spatial experiments (notably the derives ) of the French Situationists and related groups, has been investigated by several geographers: Bassett (2004); Bonnett (1989); Pinder (1996, 2001, 2005).

¹⁰There is much in this interview that demonstrates the saliency of an NRT (non-representational theory) critique of how words often struggle to be adequate in the face of embodied practices full of rich emotional resonance (rather than immediate cognitive intelligibility): see Harrison (2002); Thrift (2008); Thrift & Dewsbury (2000).

¹¹A lot of ‘text’, both shorter phrases and substantial strips of dialogue, has been omitted in the interest of saving space; these omissions have not been indicated using the [ … ] convention to save space, except on a couple of occasions where passages from the same speaker (DM) were originally interspersed with other remarks from one or both of the interviewers (HL and CP).

¹²Reynolds (2006).

¹³Founded by Julian House and Jim Jupp in 2003, ‘Ghost Box is a recording label for artists that find inspiration in library music, folklore, vintage electronics and haunted television soundtracks’ (http://www.ghostbox.co.uk/).

¹⁴ Séance at Hobbs Lane was originally released by Astra Records in 2001, and was re-released in 2008 by Ghost Box. A sample of tracks from Séance can be heard at Mount Vernon Arts Lab on: www.myspace.com.

¹⁵ Sumer Is Icumin In is ‘a traditional English round and possibly the oldest such example of counterpoint in existence. The title can be translated as ‘Summer has come in’ or ‘Summer has arrived’ … The best-known lyrics for the piece are in Middle English … The song was used at the climax of the 1973 film The Wicker Man’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer_Is_Icumen_In).

¹⁶‘Strange Fruit is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday. It condemned American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans that had occurred chiefly in the South’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit).

¹⁷‘The House of the Rising Sun is a folk song from the United States. It tells of a life gone wrong in New Orleans, and may be sung from the perspective of a woman or a man. The most famous version was recorded by the English rock group The Animals in 1964’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_ of_the_Rising_Sun).

¹⁸Mount Vernon is a district in the East End of Glasgow and, significantly, is also the name of Mulholland's ‘collective’ (a shifting body of musicians performing on various albums as the Mount Vernon Art Lab).

¹⁹‘Mount Vernon is a residential area in the east end of the City of Glasgow, Scotland. The district has a suburban feel, and is home to many large, detached homes’. It has a long history, being known in the 1500s as ‘Windy Edge’, before being renamed in the 1700s, after a naval admiral, when bought up as an estate for the merchant class: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vernon,_Glasgow.

²⁰Drone music is a dense layer of sound. It is ‘a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_music).

²¹‘Haar’ is the name given to sea mists that roll onto the eastern coast of Britain from the North Sea, even in warm weather.

²²Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001) was an English musician and composer of electronic music. She is best known for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

²³‘Julian Cope is a British rock musician, author, antiquary, musicologist, and poet who first came to prominence in 1978 as the singer and songwriter in Liverpool post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Cope).

²⁴Thomas de Quincy was author of Confessions of an Opium-Eater (1821), and lived part of his life in Glasgow.

²⁵Percy Toplis gained infamy during World War One as ‘The Monocled Mutineer’, a deserter from the British army in the Etaples Mutiny, France. Labelled a fraudster on his return, Toplis went on the run from the police and a murder charge, taking temporary refuge in the Scottish Highlands: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Toplis.

²⁶John Clare, the ‘nature’ (East Anglian) or ‘peasant poet’, was briefly incarcerated in a so-called private madhouse at High Beech in Epping Forest, Essex, from where he escaped in 1841, trudging the long journey to home to find his childhood sweetheart: see Philo (2004, Note 13, p. 393).

²⁷What is supposed the ‘classic’ phenomenological approach to place seeks to ascertain the deep-seated, transcendental ‘truths’ of places (of how humans inhabit, dwell in, nurture, and care for the places in which they live, work and play). Arguably this approach arises from the ‘phenomenological method’, the époche, where the subject cleanses him/herself of all scientific, common-sensical, personal baggage to reach a deeper level of engagement with place as‘essence’. During geography's humanistic episode of the 1970s, this approach was fiercely criticised. Arguably it returns anew, in the guise of a post-phenomenology suggested by Wylie's (e.g. 2007) landscape writing which, though less certain of whether transcendental essences are there for the discovery, is convinced of places ‘mattering’ to humans in a manner (chrono)logically prior to cognition (and, indeed, to the operation of anything bound up with an articulable identity and memory). Mulholland's emphasis on memory, clearly tied to a more sociological take on the making, remaking and relevance of personal, family and community identities, all as refracted through micro-spaces of encounter and myriad places of experience, has resonances with versions of (post-)phenomenology, but is certainly not reducible to them.

²⁸‘Sonic psychogeography’ might usefully be compared with ‘musical psychogeography’. Arguably, the former opens to a wider project where sounds, many of which might not be regarded as straightforwardly ‘musical’ come into the territory of the psychogeographer: Mulholland can aptly be cast as either.

²⁹‘Francis Thompson (1859–1907) was an English poet and ascetic. After attending college, he moved to London to become a writer, but in menial work, became addicted to opium, and was a street vagrant for years. A married couple read his poetry and rescued him, publishing his first book, Poems in 1893. Francis Thompson lived as an unbalanced invalid in Wales and at Storrington, but wrote three books of poetry, with other works and essays, before dying of tuberculosis in 1907’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Thompson).

³⁰Johnny Trunk is founder of Trunk Records, a label specialising in the re-release of esoteric music recordings for use in industrial films, radio shows, cinema, commercial television and film soundtracks: see http://www.trunkrecords.com/.

³¹ Ivor the Engine and The Clangers were popular children's television programmes first broadcast by the BBC during the 1970s. The stories were the creation of Oliver Postgate and the programme music, recently re-released by Trunk Records, was recorded by the Vernon Elliott Ensemble. See Purser (2008).

³²See Maddern and Adey (2008).

³³On the vexed questions of psychogeographical nostalgia, see Bonnett (2006, 2009).

³⁴Urban exploration groups visit the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities. Favoured architectures for exploration include derelict amusement parks, underground stations, grain elevators, factories, missile silos, hospitals, asylums, schools, and sanatoriums.

³⁵Guerilla gardening is a form of urban activism. Gardeners occupy a piece of abandoned land which they do not own to grow crops or plants, sometimes in collaboration with the local community.

³⁶The Teardrop Explodes were a British post-punk group formed in 1978.

³⁷Using an algorithmic model, these compositions were conceived around the actual map coordinates of the homes of Drew's extended family, then translated to manuscript paper and played.

³⁸‘Teaching at the University [after its foundation in 1451] began in the chapterhouse of Glasgow Cathedral, subsequently moving to nearby Rottenrow, in a building known as the ‘Auld Pedagogy’. The University was given 13 acres (53,000 m²) of land belonging to the Black Friars (Dominicans) on High Street by Mary, Queen of Scots in 1563. By the late-17th century, the University building centred on two courtyards surrounded by walled gardens, with a clock tower, which was one of the notable features of Glasgow's skyline, and a chapel adapted from the church of the former Dominican (Blackfriars) friary. This complex was one of the finest Renaissance buildings in Scotland, and its demolition, following the transferral of the University to its present site [the high ground of Gilmourhill in Glasgow's West End] in 1871 (in less ‘rough’ surroundings) was one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in 19th century Scotland’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Glasgow).

³⁹Glasgow will host the Commonwealth Games in 2014.