Mark Fisher & Justin Barton – On Vanishing Land (Flatlines)

Hyperdub inaugurate their spoken word imprint with Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s psychogeographical meditation on disappearance and the Suffolk coast

The Overlook hotel. July 4 ball, 1921. So reads the inscription on the wall-mounted photograph that Stanley Kubrick’s camera closes in on at the end of The Shining. Jack Torrance stares back at the present, the widest of grins on his face – at once genuine and yet forced upon him, in any case a mask. In a spoken word album filled with imagery and textual references, I nevertheless cannot help but add another. Mark Fisher engaged with The Shining in his writing with some frequency, so it didn’t take any great leap for my imagination to arrive there. The ideas hinted at in that picture within a motion picture seem entirely appropriate to On Vanishing Land, at least as it relates to Fisher and his body of work. If he once spoke to us from an intellectual remove – sharing concepts that generated further thinking – now he can only communicate with us from the past. His voice, heard throughout much of On Vanishing Land, has become that of a ghost. He has always been the caretaker here.

The project was generated for an exhibition in 2006, with Mark Fisher and Justin Barton capturing a psychogeographical journey they made on foot along the Suffolk coast. Hyperdub have reconceptualised the piece as an immersive album experience to inaugurate their spoken word Flatlines imprint, inviting the likes of Gazelle Twin, John Foxx and Ekoplekz to administer soundscapes that have then been pieced together to form a cohesive, evolving whole, split over two distinct sides. Decommissioned radar equipment, groynes and bunker archaeology populate the coastline and occupy Fisher’s thoughts. “This whole coast is about fending off incursions from the outside”, he explains on the record. In the main, On Vanishing Land is Fisher’s spoken narrative, with his fascination in particular subjects and penetrative thought processes in full effect. There are also excursions into external dialogues, interviews and field recordings – literalising the practice of quoting sources.

Fisher refers to himself and Barton as “they” throughout, providing degrees of distance between authors and active participants. “They had been watching the BBC adaptations of MR James’ ghost stories with the soundtrack off and with Brian Eno’s album On Land playing instead. The abstract spaces of sky and land, with a single figure in the middle distance, an incursion from the unknown”. This audiovisual mashup offers a subsequent means of access for the investigatory-inclined listener, a set of instructions to get inside the narrative without having to literally follow in footsteps. Fisher and Barton have provided the roadmap – it may be interpreted and enacted to the listener’s chosen extent. Fisher fully engages in a dialogue with works outside of On Vanishing Land – the title itself containing part of the album’s subject matter pressed between the words of the Eno album title.

MR James’s “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” was inspired by the area near Felixstowe where Fisher and Barton walk. Fisher observes that “MR James wrote from the space which was the disowned counterpart to the emergent literary modernism and from fundamentally outside the world of psychological modernism”. And that “dreams and other dreamlike states are glimpsed as worlds of exteriority” within the story. Later, they walk “in the midst of places that inspired On Land, Eno’s hauntingly sunlit 1982 album.” The last key piece of the puzzle that Fisher introduces is geographically distant (Australia rather than Sussex), but although published in 1967, it was set at the turn of the century:

“A week before they had watched Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film that dares to be about disappearance and – ultimate scandal in the male dominated world – the disappearance of extraordinary women. A film that, with Joan Lindsay’s novel from which it is very closely drawn, is a full escape toward the libidinally charged planetary thresholds of the unknown.”

The soundscapes shift and probe, tearing away at reality. Words birth each outburst of sonic maneuvering, evoking particular landscapes alongside fictional vistas. Unmarked pieces of music thus form a continuum. “The eerie is the incursion of the unknown into a silence, an emptiness, a gap.” Fourteen minutes into side two and a handful of piano keys cut into a dronescape, signalling a dream within the dreamlike, before field recordings close up the horizon. These piano interjections are restrained, but more powerful for it, bringing to mind Eyes Wide Shut and its unknowable mysteries that are seemingly resolved on the surface.

MR James and Brian Eno evoke mysteries of the unknown in the everyday. The notion that there are other worlds than these, although one cannot get to them; we are occluded, shut out. Joan Lindsay, with Picnic at Hanging Rock, suggests otherwise, according to Fisher. Lindsay “shows three women crossing a threshold of existence in midday heat and disappearing permanently into the unknown.” The young women “all escape”. Unlike Jack Torrance in The Shining, who is trapped like some sick genie in a living entity of a bottle. Fisher looks for other means of enlightenment with On Vanishing Land then. “Radar”, he considers. “Send a few clicks into the unknown. See what comes back.” The unknown roars back a sonic response. The album fades away but radiates.

On Vanishing Land must surely be considered another essential piece of the Mark Fisher canon, a fine addition to the exhaustive, but never exhausting, k-punk collection published by Repeater books late last year. It reanimates the essay within another medium much like Orson Welles did with F for Fake. Erudite and probing, yet engagingly weird. Uniquely visionary in both words and music. On Vanishing Land allows the listener to get lost in the world of Mark Fisher once again; a world that is ours seen through different eyes.

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