#tom mudd

It began with the search for the remains of a small group of people who lived on Maylord Street (then called Jewry Lane…) in Hereford, between 1179 and 1290, until they all disappeared, many without a trace. 

As always, in the absence of archaeological evidence, one only finds a mythology – as told by a witness. The Golem of Hereford, silent creature constructed as a body without organs, talks to us through the voice of another, and reinvents its own history every time we listen to it. 

"Conversation, dialogue and verbal struggle are the explicit or surface manifestations of the constitutive dialogism of the text. (…) Only the utterance, as opposed to the proposition, has full meaning, because it expects a response. (…) Language is unified only in so far as it is an abstract grammatical system; from within this abstract grammatical language there emerges a concrete historical language, harbouring a multitude of worlds, of literary, ideological and social perspectives. Nonsense as a genre is like language in this: from within the abstract formal characterisation of the genre, a multitude of discourses, of literary and ideological perspectives, develops." (J-J. Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense, 1994; 191)

Field recordings from: Maylord Street; the Catherdral Church of St Mary the Virgin and St Ethelbert the King; the Chained Library; Mappa Mundi's Museum; Hereford's market; Princelet Street; (London); a soldier's funeral; the Golem's house; all around Hereford. 

- Emmanuel Spinelli: Original concept, field recordings, interviews, composition.