#jon chapman

SOUND EPIPHANIES

(PS) – Working several decks down in the empty holds of bulk carriers at the port of Lyttelton and hearing the huge natural reverb on the clash of steel on steel anytime the ball of the crane hit the sides. Also …a childhood memory of massed cicadas in the trees at the height of summer in Christchurch sounding like the roar of the sea.

(PP) – Living in London in the early ‘90s, I was walking along a street when I heard the most incredible music up ahead (some version of Bailter Space, I thought to myself?). I quickened my pace, got to the corner and turned it to be confronted with a group of workmen digging up the road. I stood there for fully ten minutes, conflicting thoughts racing around my brain: “it’s not music… but it sounds amazing… but it’s not music… but it sounds amazing… .” That day changed something in my brain.

(JC) – The wonky, ancient, pressed-cardboard window fan of childhood summer nights; the dual fans’ drones diced up the nearby highway’s thalassic ebbs and the backyard’s bedtime chirruping. Alternately lulling and compelling. Later, re-absorbed by its corollary during sweaty graveyard shifts in a vast plastics factory amongst hundreds of rattle-patterns from the punching machines.

MUSIC

The Velvets’ ‘Sister Ray’ (and its lesser sibling, the long-form Silver Factory jam, Symphony of Sound) as being a marker and source of inspiration and permission – immersive duration and eminent distortion, feedback, structure under degrees of chaos, guts, the ecstatic emergent. Seeing.

The two Thises: This Heat (UK) and This Kind of Punishment (NZ). Coming out of/into punk/post-punk. Two new freedoms, oceans apart — still unlike anything else: urgent, elegant, potent, raw.

John Coltrane – (paraphrasing US chef Anthony Bourdain) happiness is sautéing onions and garlic to the beginning of Kulu Sé Mama. Occasionally wondering whether to throw away any record which is not by John Coltrane.

FILM

Tarkovsky. Stalker, a wondrous dream. Filmed in the ravaged eastern bloc with a sense of austere beauty, the captivating idea that there is a room in the Zone where wishes can come true; the scientist and the writer whose dreams illustrate different takes on humanity. Aching long-take slowness, the grace he finds in light: the magnetising shot in The Mirror, where an absent teacup’s steam ring swiftly dissipates from a polished tabletop.

The Holy Mountain, The carnival rapture of Jodorowsky’s divine kaleidoscope.

Chris Marker’s La Jetée – always mysterious even after many viewings, but addictive and naggingly prescient. In particular, the whispering sticks in the head.

LITERATURE

(PP) – Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, the huge wonderful meta-novel set immediately post-WWII in lawless Europe, following endless tribes crisscrossing the landscape on their way home. Convoluted plots, a cast of thousands, science, philosophy, poetry, suppressed histories, slapstick comedy, darkness and depravity as a response to war. Vectors of desire.

(JC) — On Wings of Song by Thomas Disch. Via singing plus electronics, citizens discorporate and fly free through a 21st century where Christian Right Middle America is radically separated from the decadent Coastal Elites. Art and repression, and a metaphor for LGBT liberation.