“He awoke and focussed…” The Quiet Man

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.

John Foxx - My Lost City

1. Imperfect Hymn
2. Holywell Lane
3. Magnetic Fields
4. Just Passing Through
5. Barbican Brakhage
6. Hidden Assembly
7. Hawksmoor Oribital
8. Piranesi Motorcade
9. City Of Disappearances
10. Umbra Sumus
11. Scene 27 - Intro To The Voice Behind The Wallpaper, Trellick Tower 3am

' . . . discarded songs from a lost city . . . psychic electricity reaching between buried streets and particles of magnetised iron . . . on tape made from the solidified remains of prehistoric forests . . . carried on electromagnetic impulses, crackling through time and space, into the air again.'

An extract from the sleevenotes for My Lost City by John Foxx.

My Lost City is a compilation of recordings made at The Garden studios on Holywell Lane in east London around (I'm guessing) '81-'86. It flitters between the Cathedral Oceans material and The Quiet Man piano pieces with a few minimal synth works in between.

The Cathedral Oceans material sits between religious overtones and ambient mood. However the Cathedral Oceans material on My Lost City (Barbican Brakhage, Hawksmoor Orbital) are really heavy on the religious overtones compared to what we know. It's almost as if you can hear him thinking, trying to work out exactly what he wants Cathedral Oceans to do. It's when you hear tracks such as Barbican Brakhage and Hawksmoor Orbital that you realise how much he has stripped away for Cathedral Oceans;

‘I hadn’t listened to the recordings that have just been released as the My Lost City album since they were made, over twenty years ago. When I played them I was struck by the way they evoke a time and a place - and how I’d been unaware of this when they were made.

Then they seemed like fragments, unfinished and unsatisfying. A stop on the way to somewhere else.
Now they seem like a time capsule discovered from under the streets. Made by someone else. Like an old radio tuned into a long gone station. Curious psychic electricals, crackling distantly from the speakers.’

An extract from the essay Electricity and Ghosts by John Foxx.

Living in east London, I regularly find myself wandering the same streets and places that are submerged in the text of My Lost City – Shoreditch, Spitalfields, Fournier Street, Holywell Lane, Commercial Road, The Barbican, Brick Lane, Christ Church, Fournier Street, Brushfield Street, Brune Street etc…the ghost town that Foxx recognised straight away; ‘Post industrial, empty . . . blackened buildings patterned on versions of architecture from ancient Rome’ are still almost there despite future Olympic and Square Mile utopia’s trying to erase its existence.

I'm enjoying it more than the Cathedral Oceans trilogy at the moment - I think it's because it's shiny and new and also because Cathedral Oceans is meant to wash over you to some degree, whereas My Lost City is varied enough to require further, deeper listening if you want it to. My Lost City is the hiss and spit of tape noise, the voice of Foxx splintered through long delays, tape loops and echoes into urban (imperfect) hymns to a city of disappearances …London.

John Foxx & Louis - Impossible

I think I'm gonna use this blog to write about new music, new releases. Electronic music (for me at least) should always have at least one of its feet in the future, which is a great ideal - sadly most of my electronic music has both it's feet firmly in the past.

So this is the perfect release to yak about because Foxx covers all ground; past and future. On Impossible we have the brutal proto-New Wave of The Man Who Dies Every Day, which originally appeared on Ha!-Ha!Ha! way back in 1977 and then we fast-forward to the Ballardian future that is A Million Cars.

First the cover-art, which is some exceptional collage work from the 70s. But what the hell is it? What is the head? Is it a stadium? The back of a cruise-liner? Either way, I can see thousands of people heading into a fire – a very Burroughs-style of imagery there in the cut-up figure on the front.

Which is appropriate really for this cut-up of an album. On initial listens, it was hard at first to hear much difference between the originals and these re-workings, but slowly I found Impossible’s dark, stripped-back and sprawled out minimalist architecture quietly connected (the From Trash material benefitting greatly from this). Adult Concerns is a great introduction – the whole Burning Car feel sets up the dark edges that follow. Love the beat on it too – it feels like Foxx has remembered when he and Chris Cross sat in on Lee Perry’s Bob Marley sessions back in the 70s and that can only be good thing.

It’s just my opinion but the stretched out haze of X-Ray Vision is far superior to the original version, and then there’s a fantastic version of The Man Who Dies Every Day and the new version of Crash and Burn is a fantastic closer.

I really like this new, almost shredded direction; the shredded vocals, the rusting metallic synths, the filtered drums on Walk This Way. More Please.