Outlying, Occluded, and Thwarted Literature

The previous post here was last year's end-of-year round-up. What of this year? The dreaded minus budget remains a great burden, so there's little to report. More gigs would be nice. And a job, or a bursary for study. It's tough. Maybe the backward-looking (and self-indulgent) act of summarising one's activities over the year has an element of cursedness? To avoid making the same mistake this year, I'll forecast forward instead of recapping backward. Before I do, it's worth mentioning this month Michael Umney won the International URTI Radio Grand Prix for the BBC Radio 4 show 'Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects' (mentioned in the previous blogpost), produced under the Resonance FM banner. Presented by Sarah Angliss, the programme delves into the acousmatic world of the unseen soundmaker - those people who ply their acoustical contrivances in the shadows for the service of storytelling and drama... and the documentary itself has the immersion of drama to it.

One project I hope to finally bring to fruition in 2025 is my book surveying outlying, occluded, and thwarted literature. One such piece of outlying literature was featured in the aforementioned 'Knock Knock' radio programme: 'Sound effects and how they may be produced' by Alfred Whitman (1926) - a mimeograph not seen in any library. I was first alerted to this internal BBC document by the bookseller Alan Conchar who had handled a copy around 2005. It wasn't until 2022 that I could finally see a copy, after Umney tracked one down in his programme-maker capacity by liaising with the BBC. Like all outlying literature, there are always reasons for the outlyingness. In this case, circulation was limited from the outset in view of sound-effects then being a niche interest, and also that the trade secrets of the sound-effects-person's craft are fully revealed within it.

I've been collecting offbeat books on sound since the early 2000s, and the extent to which something can be so offbeat as to become invisible was first intuited when I came across the excellent book-list compiled by gongsman Frank Perry. It contains unknown/unfindable items, such as W.G. Hooper's 1943 'The Great Musician of the Universe', and - for a long time sought - Margaret Watts-Hughes' two 'Eidophone' books (featured on Miraculous Agitations back in September 2011, where I playfully compare her sound visualisation devices to those depicted in the mysterious Voynich Manuscript). Incidentally, this year I was able to supply some images of my copies for an imminent publication putting Watts-Hughes ideas back into print. As for Frank Perry's list, which has itself become difficult to find (a shame for such a useful resource), it's on the Wayback Machine here. Perry's library of sound and music books spans a hundred years, focussing on the 'suchness' of sound and timbre - it straddles the faultlines between objective and subjective musical phenomena. The further you go towards the subjective, the more esoteric (and contentious) things become. The fizz of discussion surrounding all things contentious is of value for creativity (I argue).

Many years ago, one of my former tutors, Hugh Davies, told me something like this: if you want to find paid work as a writer/researcher, it is worthwhile to become a sort of independent curator by judiciously amassing a personal archive of rare, preferably unique historical ephemera, documents and materials. Sharing one's findings from such a private archive would offer inbuilt originality, and constitute genuinely useful new work. Gathering materials became possible by working/volunteering on the fringes of the antiquarian book trade, and even through bin diving. Davies' advice hasn't quite borne out in practice - work remains scant - although the research-driven Radionics Radio project (funded by Sound and Music) was a successful example.

Examples of outlying literature

But to return to Perry's book-list: it is significant that at the very end Perry states "it goes without saying, that I do not necessarily fully endorse everything listed above". This kind of disclaimer becomes more necessary when dealing with outlying literature. I gradually widened my scope of interest from acoustics to accounts of subjective experience of sound. At the extreme end of this genre are books such as 'Crook Frightfulness' (whose paranoid author I was able to identify), and Dorothy Burdick's 'Such Things are Known' (1982). Despite being published nearly 50 years apart, both titles are very similar autobiographical investigatory first-person accounts of hearing unseen, sinister voices. Both authors reject all diagnoses of mental illness, rigorously pursuing rational explanations, despite the apparently impossible effects described. It perhaps needn't be said that both titles were self-published.

Any self-published piece of writing prior to the internet has inherent dynamism in being an unedited self-propelled bubble of an idea. Of course, self-published efforts can burst through the bubble and find mass appeal - e.g. Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', or Erika Mitchell's 'Fifty Shades of Grey' - but my interest is in the overlooked publications. Often there is some waywardness or uncompromisingness that distinguishes these as 'difficult'. Having developed an interest in 'thwarted histories' and the dynamics of obscurity, I've found there are important stories to be told lurking behind these outliers - sometimes shedding light on marginalised communities, neurodivergence, and how fact and fiction / the objective and subjective intertwine; stories that reflect on the present-day concern with virality, Search Engine Optimisation, struggles to come to terms with modernity, and the eternal search for the optimum angle to interface with a wider public.