Young English

The British Library has launched a new webpage featuring some of their recordings of children's games and songs from the last century. Just had a cursory listen and it sounds great.

"The website is the culmination of a two year project in which we’ve been digitising previously unheard and unseen collections including the internationally renowned ‘Opie Collection of Children’s Games and Songs’ and the ‘Damian Webb/Pitt Rivers Collection’ with support from the AHRC Beyond Text programme. These collections feature audio recordings and photographs made between the 1960s and the 1980s. If, like me, you grew up in that period you’ll hear many familiar though long-forgotten playground rhymes with nostalgia and a Proustian sense of recollection."

Here is a more contemporary recording.

Weird sound

I really enjoyed this recording of a fascintaing discussion, on the under theorised notion of the Weird, with writer China Miéville. Thanks to René Wolf, at the marvellous Backdoor Broadcasting Corporation, for pushing it my way!

The talk rarely veers from the Weird as literary genre - its authors, monsters, tropes, protocols etc - to discuss its ramifications for politics, which is a shame because I really wanted to hear his thoughts on its applicability to areas outside literature. Specifically I’m interested in the possibility of a rigorously weird sound. A few times he mentions an affect peculiar to weird fiction that results from an encounter with the abcanny - some utterly confounding, unthinkable “thing like nothing ever seen before”. At one point, speaking about Lovecraft, Miéville suggests that this indescribability comes paradoxically from a surplus of description: "an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature [...] A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings." The Weird then is an excessively detailed assemblage of unusually cohering component parts. If there is a factual audio analogue to this fictional Weird assemblage it is noise.

Noise evades meaning through a surfeit of meaning and in its richness and complexity it can present us with sounds the like of which we’ve never heard before. Thinking about urban soundscapes and the potential for encountering weird sound there I remembered a weird sounding word – sharawadji. The term comes from the work of urban sound research dream team: CRESSON and designates the spontaneous combination of everyday sound objects in an unexpectedly beautiful composition. It’s rare, I’ve never heard it, but is it Weird?

“This exotic term, introduced in Europe in the seventeenth century by travellers returning from China, designates ‘the beauty that occurs with no discernable order or arrangement’. When Chinese people visit a beautiful garden that strikes their imagination because of its absence of design, it is commonly said that its ‘sharawadji is admirable’. This virtual order, imperceptible but present, produces fascination and is breathtaking. The sharawadji effect is unexpected and transports us elsewhere, beyond the strict representation of things, out of context. In this brutally present confusion we lose both sense and our sense.”

In this short description we encounter the failure of representation and understanding, sudden rupture, and loss of sense. It’s a less ecstatic Weird – no-one’s going to lose their mind after hearing sharawadji - but it’s one perhaps closer to the sublimity of Miéville’s own new Weird fiction. Anyway, have a listen - Miéville is an erudite and eloquent guide to the weird worlds of weird fiction. I’ve got a long reading list to start working through now.