In the bleak midwinter of 2001 I was working on a project called Fritware Painted With Lustre. There wasn’t too much to the project other than the name, but that was how I worked at the time. I felt that titles contained stories, pictures, songs and worlds which could be unlocked, unwrapped and presented to an audience.
One of the follies of this album was an interpretation of Veni, Veni Emmanuel which is one of my favourite Christmas carols. There’s something modally medieval in the melody of this carol, although that’s not entirely uncommon in the canon of carols. There’s also something peculiarly messianic, in a Jewish sense, about the song. Jesus is being summoned not to bring redemption to mankind or to take away our sins but to “ransom captive Israel”. We feel a slide back from the Gospels to the Torah.
None of this explains why it came out so apparently apocalyptic. Israel no-longer captive has become an aggressor once more jealously defending the land of milk and honey, smiting neighbouring people and generally putting on a bad show. I have also never quite cast off the mood of Walter M Miller’s classic A Canticle for Liebowitz. This novel casts us into a post-apocalyptic future in which monks attempt to preserve the fruits of science and learning, the bitter fruit which devastated the planet, for the return of civilisation.
Perhaps it was with these in mind that I recorded myself as an echoey four-part choir. At the time I was using an eighties Fostex reel-to-reel tape machine for all of my recordings. So the voices were pitch-shifted by physically altering the tape speed, meaning that while I slowed down the tape to record the treble part the bass rumbled into the floorboards, giving my neighbours a terrifying seasonal treat. As to what exactly is being chewed up and regurgitated by the Casio SK5 sampling keyboard to create the torn plane of desolation around the finished piece, I really can’t remember.
A decade later in another mild winter after the end of the world, it seemed like a good idea to find some footage to accompany this piece. Archive.org as ever came up trumps with a nuclear test film by Joe Bonica. Haunting, awe-inspiring – I can take no credit for this – and it was only later that I remembered about Britain’s nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean in the fifties. Most notably at Christmas Island.
Which is pretty much where we came in; now knowing the place for the first time.
