BIKE CEMETERY VALEDICTION

A valedictory iteration of some of the - now sadly occluded - inscriptions on the Bike Cemetery wall. This video was taken at the Bike Cemetery on a Sunday in May 2017.
WOLF VANISH from robin bale on Vimeo.

POD ACADEMY

The Bike Cemetery in Winter 2012

 My podcast, Return to the Bike Cemetery, is now available on www.podacademy.org
 there's some other very good stuff on there too, including a talk from a historian of smell, an ethnomusicological discussion of the music of the BayAka people, and a discussion of  manifestations of economic thought in cultural products. It's a very pleasingly heterogenous collection.

My piece is the first in a projected series of three programmes that will take different levels of interpretation (or degrees of generality) and angles towards the Bike Cemetery. They will all be equally preoccupied with sound, though; how it can evoke a space, or series of them, how it can internally dislocate a space (especially when broadcast to somewhere else), and its temporality - that is, its passing, which is of course the precondition of its stubborn or uncanny return (say, in the use of delay).

A rough outline might go: Bike Cemetery - empty space (as in Claude Lefort's image) - sovereignty of subject (bourgeois liberal democratic) - sovereignty (as in Karl Schmitt's version of decision) - exception and example, and the spatial relationship that both categories necessitate - Bike Cemetery - waste ground - "waste" in terms of time - metaphors of "natural" growth/accumulation - the responsibilized subject - "unnatural" growth/stasis - the welfare state and its characterisation by the likes of Charles Murray - "addiction" as trope, to benefits or (for the state) to debt - addiction as perpetual return (to same place) therefore antithesis of neoliberal models of growth or statehood - the stuttering, repetitive inscriptions at the Bike Cemetery.

I realise that the outline just given might seem confused, fragmentary and a bit dry, but I am going to do my best to make it a coherent trip through some contemporary obsessions. I think that the audio essay form can do this well. 

SAINT JAMES' INFIRMARY

Shortened version of this track - a rough mix, too, which will be sorted. The full extravaganza (featuring the Bike Cemetery Brass) will be posted in the fullness of time.

The song itself will be familiar to most. I have adapted some of the words, which are the result in any case of many interpolations and accretions over the song's long history.

I realise that the vocal in the spoken section is unclear (which will be fixed shortly with some judicious compression) so here's what I am saying:

Can't miss it, mate -Just a step up the road, through the freshly privatised out-patients' clinic without walls, the result of a recent merger with the debtors' prison. Cemetery gates on the left, 24 hour offy on the right, and all the  bright new shining glass, playschool clad, buy to let cash-farms gleaming like an advert for  the transparency and self presence of the well-lived life. It's just there - yeah, next to those hoardings displaying gym-zombies with bodies like well sculpted CVs and posters exhorting responsible citizens to do something wild and life-affirming -   go shopping. There's pictures of them gurning like giro day. It's a small door.

 There's a buzzer.

If they ask, say I sent you

Obviously, the best ever version - for both its sound and the morbid-hallucinatory visuals, is this one. Sorry about the ad at the beginning.

ABJECT BLOC - WOLF VANISH

So just did the Abject Bloc show. Think that it went well. It did from my perspective anyway - layers of (fake, digital) tape delay and relatively well mixed drums. Ended up on London Bridge, drinking some cans from the offy and looking at the lights  of the city (olympic logos aplenty) smearing across the currents whilst the local constabulary hassled (black) drivers who were crossing the water there. Documentation of show - strikes me just now, the parallel of presenting one's documentation - will be here by tomorrow or something.

THE BIKE CEMETERY INVOCATION

The imagery here is taken from the wall of incantations and tutelary animals in the Bike Cemetery, created by anonymous. The additions are Breakfast Raven, a chthonic deity alluded to, but not directly pictured on the wall, and the Weeping Surveyor - an avatar of Adam after the Fall and Expulsion, who obsessively measures and builds, but cannot face looking at his own work.


Untitled from robin bale on Vimeo.

The sound was recorded live at the JAM conference at Reading University on 6th May this year, my voice was looped digitally. The text is from the incantations/spells on the Bike Cemetery walls.