96 pages
182 mm x 128 mm
90 mm cover flaps
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9993276-9-9
£12 (£2.50 p&p)
A Dog at the Edge of Things Angus Carlyle
Leaning over the bed, I tilt and shake my shoes,
wary that the mate of the centipede killed yesterday could still be at large. I
head from the guesthouse down the wide pavement that the white-painted tree
trunks separate from the road. Cloudbanks seem to lour over to the west in the
gloom before dawn. Later, the smell of dough changing into bread turns me
towards a large window glowing white in the darkness, swung wide open with
bakers bent in steam and puffs of flour. As the sky lightens, what were once clouds
become mountains fringed with old vegetation.
‘Sounds haunt these texts, erupting
suddenly, evoking memories, or wild to themselves.The precarity of the
audio-artist’s process is generously exposed in these records of attempts to
capture the vibrant elemental world he immerses himself in. Always conscious
that he is not some detached observer, he very much desires to be part of the
whole, even if he is sometimes at the mercy of unpredictable weather and
landscapes.
The writing captures moments others might not give time
to, background details are anything but; an epic contained in a wave moving
pebbles, or smoke curling through a street lamp’s glare. The writer is sharp-eared and eyed like the often mentioned birds that
appear amongst these pages, offering up a fox's scream, a
chalk-gleam, the swerve of a jet, the language itself circling and enfolding
the sounds and sights.
Field recording and writing are depicted as a kind of
hunting, animal-like, but with delicate equipment, human vulnerability, and
compassion. The moods and activities of light and weather are given as much
agency as any human, and seem immense and mysterious in their passing. Mundane
detail is always on equal footing with the sublime in these writings, or maybe
it was always sublime all along.’
- Suzanne Walsh
‘The index precedes encounter. Code and
classification hum in anticipation. This prophetic includes what was never
published, and what was rejected (inevitably - Cassandra knew this, keenly).
Carlyle is no less enthusiastic. Previously he has run his way towards record
and the provisions of meaning. Here he gathers the moments in shards of richly
sonic upload. Place / s is / are the ground of the work, various and hybrid.
Text, talk, essay, blog, submission, report, diary, chapter, sleevenote: the
form proposes an outcome this suggestively elusive anthology resists. The dog
might be at the edge but place yourself central: read its
constellation. Stories don't need plots, but they require attention. This
is a listening device, a collection of fugitive pieces for uncertain times, one
to carry with you.’
- Gareth Evans, Adjunct Moving Image Curator,
Whitechapel Gallery, London
© Joan Publishing