My Lost City

My Lost City: You move on and unknowingly leave ghost behind. Memories, photographs, notebooks, recordings. Evidence of other lives. Former self walking down lost streets. Occasionally you meet again. In a room sealed up at the end of the last century, an old radio tuned into vanished stations. Music from twenty years ago. Electricity and ghosts. This was Spitalfields and Shoreditch, East London early 1980's. Derelict. Layers of soot blackened the walls. Dennis Severs, Gilbert and George, Raf Samuels and a few others living there. Poorest part of London. Plague pits under the streets, Roman temples underneath, pagan temples under those. The eradicating clamour Commercial Road and Shoreditch High Street. Out of all this mayhem of memory and time, a Hawksmoor church rimed with dirt and soot rising into the grey skies. I built a studio in the basement and began recording. I remember trying to make connections in this little laboratory, and always feeling I'd failed. Lost between synthesisers and hymns and cities, churches, electricity and memory. So I put the tapes away and forgot about them. All those fragmented elements - attempts to capture ambiences remembered from singing in a church when I was a child in industrial Lancashire, another lost city. Trying somehow to draw lines in and out of the other fragments and glimpses - Victorian psychic experiments that eventually arrived at electricity, radio and television. Trellick Tower as a church of blackened modernity. The Paris Arcades, Parc Monceau, Avenham Colonnade, Suicide Bridge and Electricity Pylons. Architectural Music. City as Memory. Derelict Lancashire mills built on patterns from ancient Rome seen again in New York. Electrochemical recordings of the dead producing glowing media ghosts - Marilyn, Bogie, Cary Grant, Rita Heyworth, voices of TS Elliot, WH Auden. Photographs and film of demolished buildings, lost versions of New York and London. In Central Manhattan in the 1970's I'd made notes to write hymns for buildings and streets. Wanting to connect ancient embedded church music to modern cities via electronics, without disrupting continuity. The continuity was the point. Ghosts and electricity. Drawing lines between Lancashire, Rome, New York, Paris and London. Trellick Tower and Brakhage. Film as a bioelectrical medium. Discovering the unrecognised present. Walking and dreaming. Geometries of coincidence, recognition, connection. Later discovering fragments of writing and ideas that chimed with many of these in Sinclair, Doctorow, Burroughs, Auster, Brakhage, Ballard, McLuhan, Weiczs-Bryants, Kneale, Pessoa, Ackroyd, and De Bord, among others. The studio occasionally flooded an inch or so at the street end, even when the Thames water table was not high. Surveyor said this was the old Holy Well overflowing. Water arriving from rainfall somewhere else. Some Archeologists had recently caught diseases from excavated plague pits nearby. The ground and the air seemed permeated with resonant molecules conducted by Thames water and the Holy Well and London traffic and God knows what else. All swirling slowly around the walls of the building in the streets and underground. Permeating the entire area. These recordings were made in that time and place. Discarded songs from a lost city. Psychic electricity reaching between buried streets and particles of magnetised iron, on tape made from the solidified remains of prehistoric forests. Carried on electromagnetic impulses, crackling through time and place, into the air again. John Foxx 2009