The sound piece by musicians Jimmy Cripps and Rico Borza, and sound designer
Jesse T. Rybolt, commissioned to accompany the David Quentin photography exhibition Silt (following Robert Macfarlane's Essex walk on the Broomway) has been released (download only - boo!) by Brainlove Records, under the moniker of 'The Pale Horse'.
More Eerie Anglia explorations, Suffolk hauntology via Mordant Music, Travelogues 11: Reading RheuMatisM. Here's Baron Mordant's description:
"Ohm vanishing land...Woodbridge via Dunwich via Hastings...hand dryer
via ad-hoc car park choir via esturial mud-slapping...plenty of rheum at
the reading rooms...Sebald's contrails...Eno's nose...'local
mafia'...k_punk silted up for the duration..."
With the flood defences along most of the River Crouch, there are few places where you can observe the unobstructed process of erosion. Here is one, the Creeksea Cliffs, on the north shore between Althorne and Burnham-on-Crouch. These are clay cliffs tumbling into the river, bringing trees along with them and revealing untouched flint cells to the sky. It's a fossil haunt too apparently, the source of shark teeth and Ray fangs, arrowheads and more. We beachcombed for pottery fragments and interesting shells. Near the eastern extremity lay a lamb corpse, its face eaten off.
Estuarine mediations from Rachel Lichenstein and James Price charting the passage of a motley crew from Queenbrough, across the shipping channels, to Southend Pier.
More edgelands action in Essex in Kieran Evans's film The Outer Edges, a visual partner to Karl Hyde's forthcoming new album Edgeland (perhaps a sequel to Underworld's album Barking?). According to The Guardian story about it, it's a 'rather moving, artful documentary essay about the Essex borderlands, following the route of the river Roding down to the docks on the Thames estuary.
This is an edge I've got some personal history with having lived on boats in Barking Creek, the final crook of the Roding into the Thames. It was, and is, bandito country - with pirate capitalists, ex-junkies, ketamine zombies, DIY supremos, artists, suicides, thieves, prostitutes, greasemonkeys, rafts of global flotsam. When the weather was warm, and a hog was roasting riverside and a fairy light strand of bulbs hung across the sky casting magic illumination on a gathering of friends - then you valued the marginal. But in winter, when you heated snow from the roof in a pan on a gas ring to get warm water to wash with, when the wood in the shitty stove just heated the air above your barely insulated roof, when you woke in the morning and stared up at the ice rings on the nail heads in the ceiling wood above - it was a different kind of edginess. Still magickal, often, mind - but without the seasons, the place was also cursed. Shady deals, bad debts, boats stolen under contract - one man dead by drowning, one woman dead by hanging, the paedophile confessed under acid, children at risk from all sorts (lots of loco, little parentis - even from the parents), there was a hex on the place. I had the feeling, that the longer I was there, the worse the things I would see.
There was potential there - these are the types of 'no-road' places Stewart Brand speaks of in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built places where nobody cares what your doing, creative incubators, little bits of freedom. At a stretch, you could also go all Hakim Bey - at times it was a temporary autonomous zone. Too temporary though, and there were ruthless landlords (riverlords?) 'running' the place through their creepy Coco the clown agent - a curly haired scare face you could imagine waking to see stood above you with a knife to your neck. The Sausalito houseboat community of San Francisco it was not. Before too long we tried to make an escape, hired a licenced skipper to guide us round the coast to Maldon. We caught the cats, threw off the ropes and slid down the creek to Reiner's boat, paying cash for diesel tapped from its abundant tanks. [He would hang himself later too, down some other creek.]. The water was with us, the barrage was open - out past Creekmouth, under the tidal barrier and we were in the Thames proper heading east.
The riverside walk along the flood defences, west from Althorne to North Fambridge, cold eothen wind to the back. The partly flooded Bridgemarsh Island lies to the left for most of the journey. Enclosed by a 'sea wall' by 1736, when those same defences were partly destroyed, the island was once inhabited, farmed and had a brickworks, tile-works, shop and a school. But it would be slowly abandoned to the tides, as holding back the waters became more difficult and costly. The island was overcome in the 1953 floods with remaining parts of its defences being taken to shore up others on the mainland south shore of the Crouch.
Learn more about Bridgemarsh Island in Essex Coastline:Then and Now by Matthew Fautley and James Garon (Matthew Fautley, 2004)
"
Then far away beyond the Crouch, came another striding over some stunted
trees, and then yet another still farther off wading deeply through a
shiny mud flat half way up between sea and sky. By midday they passed
through Tillingham, which strangely enough seemed silent and deserted,
save for a few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they
suddenly came into sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of
shipping of all sorts that it is possible to imagine."
