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Remaking (Islands Series I)

by Sports Pharmacy

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  • Poster/Print + Digital Album

    Poster risograph printed by Wild Press, Wild & Kind Studios, Glasgow - wildandkind.com. Images and layout by John Harries, words by John Morgan.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Remaking (Islands Series I) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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1.
crest 04:24
2.
new city 02:40
3.
ancona 05:54
4.
re_making 39:44

about

“There’s a palpable sense of hyperreality in the way that Cartledge manipulates breaths and footsteps into horror sound effects, and in the mix of casual chatter with more staged conversation...There is humour, dread and drama in the sequencing of material...the inherent mystery of the stacked up and packed in the proximity of the estate.”

Claire Biddles for The Wire, May 2022.

'Remaking' started with the final track here of the same name, the centrepiece of an online sound work about, and intended to be listened to within the Honor Oak Estate, South-East London.

Every sound heard in that work was either recorded at or intimately connected to the estate: taken from local government propaganda films about the wave of slum-clearing housing designed to improve the lives of Britain’s long-neglected urban working class; from conversations with local residents; stitched together from field recordings from hours spent walking around the estate. Long passages of it are fairly obviously ‘produced’, the audio samples clearly designed to evoke a certain affect; others are minimally so, intended to blend with the ambient sound heard while walking through the estate on an average day (or now, in this form, wherever you happen to be), the noise around you permeating and remaking what you hear through headphones or speakers. re/making.

The piece played online on a constant loop, there for visitors to arrive at and leave it as they arrived at and left the estate estate itself; but in that asking listeners to take note of the moment in time, the place and how it shaped the sound, how long they remained and listened. Making and remaking the space in the experience of the particular confluence of site and sound each listener found.

More on the 'Re/making Space' project is included below for context, but from there, this release grew three more tracks, each tracing lines from the one source and finding different expressions of the organic qualities of urban spaces, the old underlying the new, layer on layer on layer, the complex emotional and social ambivalence of cities and towns. The album as a whole remains a space to be in, a place to live in, sometimes warm, lit orange, sometimes cold and hard.

credits

released April 25, 2022

Written, performed, recorded and produced by Luke Cartledge.
Special thanks to John Morgan of the Honor Oak Tenants and Residents’ Association for his help with the 'Re/Making Space' project, and words contributed to this recording and reproduced for the print.

On 'Re/Making Space' (text by Luke Cartledge):

“A culture is common meanings, the product of a whole people, and offered individual meanings, the product of a man’s whole committed personal and social experience. It is stupid and arrogant to suppose that any of these meanings can in any way be prescribed; they are made by living, made and remade, in ways we cannot know in advance.”
Raymond Williams, Culture Is Ordinary, 1958

How do we understand ideas around ‘place’, ‘community’, or ‘belonging’ in the 21st-century neoliberal city? In a context of continual gentrification, intimately linked with a spiralling housing crisis (or, as Anna Minton has pointed out, simply a model of capitalist urbanism functioning as intended), regional inequality and rising xenophobia, how can we rethink place as something in which communities can live, interact, self-determine, be? How does the political left begin to challenge the reactionary tenor of the discourse around such vital questions without ceding ground to the right’s völkisch position on ‘real people’, ‘real communities’, or, worst of all, ‘authenticity’? How can we approach a spatial politics that transcends capitalist property relations, is resolutely anti-racist and genuinely inclusive, and deals robustly with the complex, dialectical relationships between communities and place, solidarity and urbanism, culture and housing?

It would be a folly to assert that a project like re/making space has any answers to these questions, but the work seeks to engage with them nonetheless, challenging their terms and inviting new perspectives. Every time a listener accesses the work within the Honor Oak Estate, they are making and remaking a new version of the estate. The audio is broadcast on a loop, 24/7; every time you tune in, it’ll be at a different point. You enter and leave the estate – and the audio – at a unique point in history, creating and recreating your own context through which to engage with the space around you; this project seeks to emulate and draw attention to that experience. You needn’t be from the estate, own a part of it, or have even been there before, to be able to engage with this process of making and remaking; you simply need to
be there in the present.

To borrow from the Williams quote above, a culture is a dynamic, interwoven process of common meaning – and that’s what a place is too. The Honor Oak Estate is a living ecosystem, within whose boundaries the memories of its residents, the aspirations of its youth, and the frustrations of its workers constantly play out and interact alongside so much more. By acknowledging and embracing this multiplicity, with all the ambiguities, complexities and problems that may entail, perhaps we can begin to understand how to engage with the space around us a little better.

Some background on the estate:
With its squat, red-brick tenement buildings, deck-access flats and plentiful (if under-designed) green spaces, the Honor Oak Estate is a prime example of the large-scale social housing built by the London County Council between the First and Second World Wars. Its broad blocks and relative lack of amenities make the estate one of London’s less fetishised examples of mid-20th-century municipal urban planning; it has little of the grandeur of its more ornate interwar cousins in Camberwell or Bermondsey, the suburban idealism of the Becontree Estate, or the striking lack of compromise which informed the brutalist turn that followed a couple of decades later. Yet on sober inspection, especially to a young person with years of experience of renting privately in the area in the kinds of appalling conditions to which a generation of London tenants have had to become accustomed, this is not poor quality housing; it’s in an awkward location, and for an estate of its size its facilities are thin on the ground, but the flats aren’t tiny, and have been maintained well by the local authority. There’s an active tenants’ association, a raft of community-led clubs and youth initiatives, and the blocks are laid out with a decent level of consideration for open space, light, and greenery.

On a more explicitly political level, this pocket of South East London has seen its share of spatial radicalism down the years. In the 19th century, nearby One Tree Hill was famously defended by local workers as a wave of enclosures across South London, Kent and Surrey threatened to rob the public of access to this distinctive beauty spot; a similar defence was made of Sydenham Common, a mile or so south of here, two hundred years earlier. More recently, the former Old Tidemill Garden in Deptford was the subject of a similar struggle between 2016 and 2019; a ten-minute walk from the estate towards Peckham takes you into the jurisdiction of Southwark Council, whose complicity in the gentrification and ‘redevelopment’ of its social housing and public space (read: destroying established communities and allowing the deportation of many of its most vulnerable residents) have been resisted by local anti-raids groups, tenants associations and grassroots organisations.

re/making space attempts to engage with the Honor Oak Estate as it is, has been, and could be. It is intended to be listened to actively, on location in the estate, made and remade as you experience the area’s physicality. No two experiences of the work will be the same, as no two experiences of the estate are ever identical.

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The Lumen Lake London, UK

The Lumen Lake is an artist-run label for new and unusual music. Emerging from the primeval swamp of live nights of the same name at Lewisham Arthouse in SE London, and now based in South Ayrshire, the label celebrates DIY practice, alternative electronics, improvisation and other music that isn’t easily categorised. ... more

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