1. The Quiet Man
2. A Man Made Of Shadows
3. Cathedral Oceans
4. The Grey Suit
5. Shifting City
About 20 years ago, the 1960s electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros devised a philosophy called Deep Listening, through her Deep Listening Band;“Deep Listening specializes in performing and recording in resonant or reverberant spaces such as cathedrals and huge underground cisterns" said Oliveros. After wading through much philosophastery, you’ll find that, cruicially, Deep Listening is a sort of ‘anti-ambient Ambient’ if you like. Unlike Eno – it asks that you treat these quiet forms, not as background, but as you would say - works by Beethoven or Wagner. It demands that you listen.
The Quiet Man is a spoken word recording (the voice being Justin Barton, not Foxx) reciting a handful of short stories about The Quiet Man (You can find the original texts here; http://blog.thequietman.co.uk/category/quietman/). Beneath Barton’s recitation, Foxx has scored the narrative with some very haunting Harold Budd-like piano as well as sounds of birdsong filtered through the sparse ambient structures that swell up in his Cathedral Oceans music.
Foxx has been working on the novel of The Quiet Man since the late 70s – early texts being issued as far back as 1981. In recent years, the text was given a new lease of life by Mark Fisher – aka K-Punk as part of his Londonunderlondon project for Resonance FM. It was Fisher who fused the text with texts from J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World among others – creating an audio document of a liquid city narrated by Barton. It’s probably thanks to Londonunderlondon that The Quiet Man has taken this new form.
'The origins of the novel are firmly cinematic,' states Foxx of his ongoing Quiet Man project. 'I found an old grey suit in a charity shop in the 1970s. Over the years, I got some friends to wear the suit in various locations in London. I filmed them just walking or sitting in cafes or apartments. As I did this, The Quiet Man story began to emerge. It's about London becoming overgrown, about the suit being alive somehow, and the way cities can alter us – and our memories.' 'It's also about film', he adds. 'In the novel, The Quiet Man walks into the screen at one point. I think we all do this when we view a film, We enter into it. Participate. Travelling without moving. If that isn't magic, I don't know what is.'
“His hand fell through the crumbling book. Fragments of it spun in slow motion away into the distances around him. Fascinated, he felt himself drawn through the page into the vast shifting sea. There was a slow swirl of blue-gold pierced by dappled sunlight. Then he was swimming effortlessly though it, whirling in delight. Of course he could breathe the water. It was a warm, supportive medium. He felt the boundaries of his body dissolve until he ceased to differentiate between himself and the huge blue ocean. Any sense of time and distance was lost in the endless glimmering depths.”
Excerpt from the short story Cathedral Oceans by John Foxx
I think The Quiet Man album is somewhere between both philosophies, uniquely developing its own ideal. The piano work on here is much more fragile, much more subtle than on previous Quiet Man recordings – which are practically Motörhead in comparison – so light is the touch here, like the Quiet Man sat alone with his crumbling book, I feel that to listen too hard may cause the sound to turn to mist. The piano work, in its own quiet way, screams ‘ambient’. But the text isn’t. The text is (and still is) a life’s work and demands to be heard, and should be heard.
So, (and maybe I’m thinking about it too much, but here’s the point) how do you listen to The Quiet Man?
I’ve tried the Deep Listening approach – late at night, headphones on and all is dark. But my mind wanders, occasionally The Quiet Man comes out of mist and then he’s off again – Hyde Park probably. I lose the thread but catch the flow. And then I fall asleep.
Another night, The Quiet Man as radio play – I’m reading a book, treating it as ambience now, but there’s too much interference - The Quiet Man may be anonymous but the prose isn’t and the striking imagery cuts through the room, the book and demands to be heard.
Foxx once said a long time ago when he stepped back into the light again that;
“It’s music for cities and people who live in cities. And that’s always been confirmed because if we play in the West Country nobody comes! But if we play in Manchester, and everywhere we go – the industrial places are the places that recognise the music straight away. You take it into the countryside – it doesn’t work….it’s a new form of urban blues…”
Yes he was talking about Shifting City - his album with Louis Gordon - but I thought about this recently and decided to take The Quiet Man out and about on my journeys to work; on the District Line, through St. James’ Park, Victoria Station etc. And although those places are particular to London I got the sense that any city would work, but essentially, it has to be a city. As I wandered through rush-hour traffic and people, through all the noise of a city The Quiet Man filtered in and out with the cars, the trains, the noise – and for me it worked.
God help you if you’re listening to this in the Peak District.
