Another delightful little collab with J. Worms. I recently met a French woman in a squat in Switzerland who had lived in south-east London in the 90's. The wide-eyed energy with which she spoke about her time there made me feel slightly vindicated in my sense of nostalgia for a particular type of, now relatively marginalised subculture of exploratory and/or free music that I tried, through the lens of Edwardian romanticism, to evoke with this soundtrack. And which, whether successfully evoked or not, was some kind of inspiration.
I'm sure London is still very exciting if your in the right situation. And it still has lots of lovely parks.
hand developed 16mm rushes of a park | 3' | 2018 | Sound: Benjamin Whitehill
"An experiment in hand developing 100ft of 16mm film in my flat. Just a collection of shots of Ruskin Park in Camberwell... The real action is on the soundtrack, which I asked Benjamin Whitehill to construct. He wanted to draw out the aesthetics of the city which surrounds the tranquil Edwardian Park, as well as evoke a sense of the musical history of the area - ‘exploratory music, improv, avant rock post punk kinda stuff’.
Ben finishes: ‘So that was a vague consideration in terms of, I suppose, 'musical aesthetic.' In a very loose sense I was trying to create a kind of lament for this stuff and a related atmosphere of London which seems to be lost but is also largely imaginary to me... A nostalgic view on a somewhat mythical past of the sort that cities always seem to possess after they reach some kind of 'development' critical mass. In the case of London, one which seems to have remained fairly intact right up until the point when I was old enough to really appreciate the city. Boo!’"
I'm sure London is still very exciting if your in the right situation. And it still has lots of lovely parks.
hand developed 16mm rushes of a park | 3' | 2018 | Sound: Benjamin Whitehill
"An experiment in hand developing 100ft of 16mm film in my flat. Just a collection of shots of Ruskin Park in Camberwell... The real action is on the soundtrack, which I asked Benjamin Whitehill to construct. He wanted to draw out the aesthetics of the city which surrounds the tranquil Edwardian Park, as well as evoke a sense of the musical history of the area - ‘exploratory music, improv, avant rock post punk kinda stuff’.
Ben finishes: ‘So that was a vague consideration in terms of, I suppose, 'musical aesthetic.' In a very loose sense I was trying to create a kind of lament for this stuff and a related atmosphere of London which seems to be lost but is also largely imaginary to me... A nostalgic view on a somewhat mythical past of the sort that cities always seem to possess after they reach some kind of 'development' critical mass. In the case of London, one which seems to have remained fairly intact right up until the point when I was old enough to really appreciate the city. Boo!’"
