BLACK POWDER

Benjamin Furly's Library

Produced as part of a co-commissioning residency exchange with Radiophrenia, Glasgow and WORM, Rotterdam. Recorded at Worm Sound Studios and a bungalow in Wielewaal, June 2023. Colquhoun & McNeill found themselves locked in an airless cellar in Rotterdam for what seemed like an eternity. Surrounded by a bewildering array of vintage synths that neither artist had any idea how to switch on never mind play and as their incessant bickering lurched ever closer to the daily fistfight Colquhoun babbled gibberish into a broken cassette recorder whilst McNeill attempted to electrolyse his frontal lobe and not for the last time.  The trick seemed to be to record everything all the time as every five hours or so a dying synthesiser would vomit a few seconds of barely salvageable audio, its circuits fried by a decrepit power cable or the overzealous application of some Space Echo. From these fragments they were able to construct a gnostic grammar from which to mimic the machines they consistently tried to destroy. Colquhoun had become particularly skilled in apeing the high end screech of a badly patched ARP 2600.  A guitar lead coils itself slowly into a gordian knot like a snake that can’t quite stomach eating its own head, the calcified circuit board reroutes itself as self-immolating electro-pictograms and in the over-defined flicker and glare of the studio lighting Colquhoun mistakes a toaster for a vintage mic spending yet another wasted afternoon whispering enochian incantations into the heating element.

THE BURIED CATHEDRAL

ATOM presents: THE BURIED CATHEDRAL. A dauner along the spiral vortex. A short work of docufiction. the pagan gods are not so long dead

THREEPWOOD

ATOM presents: THREEPWOOD. The Redacted Stones. A docufiction in eight fragments.

BLACK POWDER

ATOM presents: BLACK POWDER Delineating the Blasted Peninsula. On the trail of Alfred Nobel. A work of docufiction.

THE INLAND CASTAWAYS (2021)

Jim Colquhoun and Jamie McNeill have been walking out into denuded landscapes and talking shite for over twenty years now. Usually a camera is turned on accidentally in someones pocket and their cod-psychogeographical drivel is captured through sheer incompetence. The fractured, purposeless and ill-considered invective is frankly embarrassing and putting some kind of awful didgeridoo-a-like pan pipes over the top was/is a risible idea which nevertheless has a certain rough charm! They share a passion for landscapes that others might consider marginal at best and have a predilection for a certain kind of open-ended poetics carried out in situ using whatever broken bits of language or technology come to hand. Join them as they mutter over mushrooms, talk to the animals, fondle the stones, take luncheon amidst a bog, howl in a tunnel, lose themselves then find themselves again and take stock of the changing nature of landscape in places that quite literally repel your average rambler. So, a collage of inane chatter, warped soundscapes, weather, squelchy field recordings and Moor ore.