Crossing of Crossings

Oxmardyke is named for a now defunct Yorkshire rail crossing. In 2017, sound recordist Chris Watson set up microphones alongside the tracks of the Hull Line, initially to record a freight train. But Watson soon began making multiple recordings from around the site over several weeks. The late Philip Jeck, turntablist, composer, and artist, would twist these recordings into Oxmardyke during the final couple months of his life, dying in March 2022. Ranging for eerie to abrasive, melancholy to crushing, Jeck has morphed Watson's purposeful recordings of trains, bridges, and water into an array of cavernous and reverberating pieces which swallow up the landscape, railway, and cars alike. The resulting record is one about crossings, not only Oxmardyke crossing itself but also the crossing of Watson and Jeck, natural and industrial, high and low fidelities, signal and noise. Oxmardyke is a complex and intense sonic space, a testament to both of its creators' mastery, and, ultimately, a beautiful record about the forgotten places where nature and culture meet.

Bird song serves as a recurring motif, scattered across the album's nine tracks. Its deployment on the opener, ‘Oxmardyke’, is illustrative of the record's preoccupation with nature and society in dialogue, conflict, and collapse. A twittering bubbles across the stereo field, a mostly unaltered version of Watson's recording, before an alarm of some kind begins to beep, oscillating between notes, breaking the pastoral spell. First a car, then a train whoosh by. A thin and highly treated drone emerges beneath the bird song and trains, a sound not clearly assignable to the orders of vehicles, alarms, birds, and wind. This track and the penultimate ‘Salt End’ let Watson's recordings breathe and come to the forefront. Yet, Jeck's wiry undergrowth of clearly treated sound refuses a naturalisation of the scene. Unlike some of the work from Natasha Barrett's (also excellent) recent album of electronically altered field recordings, Reconfiguring the Landscape (2023), we can never be wholly ‘immersed’ in the location of Oxmardyke in the sense that the landscape of sounds can be picked out and spatialised. This disconnect, felt strongly on the dark and rumbling ‘Barn’ and ‘Drum’, complicates the narrative of environmental exploitation that the album seems to open up before us: the cars and trains drowning out the birds, society/humans/capital churning up the landscape, dark satanic mills, and so forth. There is, of course, a very real sense of anthropogenic environmental collapse, as when the metallic high-pitched ringing on ‘Coop’, a sound situated all too perfectly in the centre of the aural space, masks the soundscape of bird calls captured in dispersed stereo. But this binary of artificial/natural breaks down aurally as the track progresses. String-like swells rise, creeping in sinisterly; the birds drop out. When they re-emerge, the calls are as centred as the ringing sound from the track's opening, losing their illusion of naturalness and the immediacy of their previous audio spatialisation.

Perspective, or loss thereof, is for acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer a key distinction between high-fidelity (hi-fi) and low-fidelity (lo-fi) soundscapes. Schafer almost entirely equates the former with ‘natural’ environments – forests, the countryside, etc. – whilst the latter is ubiquitous with industry, cities, cars, and other vehicles. His distinction proves illuminating when listening to Oxmardyke. For Schafer, a hi-fi soundscape, possessing a ‘favourable signal-to-noise ratio’, is ‘one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level’ and ‘there is perspective-foreground and background …’, whilst in a lo-fi soundscape ‘individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds’.¹ ‘Coop’ initially seems to make this distinction, with the hi-fi, clearly spatialised recordings of Watson smothered by Jeck's crackling lo-fi orchestra, but the return of the bird song at the track's end problematises the division, the sound resting between the immediate and the manipulated, the natural and the technological, human and non-human.

This in-between quality, the uneasy and intense encounter of cars, muffled voices, and trains with plants, birds, and the elements pervade the record. It becomes most explicit on ‘Bridge’, where the sound of running water flows into the tidal rushes of cars. This shimmering bed is cut across or bridged by the thunderous clunking of the bridge itself, the joints shuddering under the weight of what crosses it. These thuds speak to Michel Serres's important point that signal arises out of noise through an essentially exclusionary process (i.e. this part of the soundscape is meaningless noise – we will ignore it; this part is meaningful noise – we will decode it): as the bridge cuts across the cars and water, it divides, marks, renders audible the divide which it also bridges. In fact, this process affected this review. As I walked through Norwich listening to the opening track, I realised I was filtering out the actual bird song around me to make the recorded bird song meaningful. Schafer's ‘favourable signal-to-noise ratio’ of the natural world was always predicated on a gate box, on Schafer allowing only certain sounds to cross into the realm of meaning. He does acknowledge, however, in his book The Tuning of the World (1977), the influence of fusing electronic with natural sounds in his own compositions and that ‘The polynoise of the sea resembles the white noise of the laboratory’.² Such a sentence might sum up numerous albums from Jeck's career, most notably his 1999 masterpiece Surf and its monstrous opener, ‘Demolition’. Oxmardyke is also at this crossing of white noise and polynoise, the point at which human structures flow into natural ones and vice versa, our impact on our environment, its impact on us. It prods at what we choose to cut out, the spaces of crossing which we ignore, or pass over as non-places, recasting Oxmardyke as a crossing of crossings, the place where nature and society dissolve into each other.

Given the bleak outlook of our current ecological crisis (citation surely unnecessary), tracks like ‘Bridge’, ‘Coop’, and the closing ‘Spurn’ at times inspire dread. The latter in particular, consisting of pummelling water submerging the listener and the death knell of a single bird croaking faintly in the left channel, presages a future already written in the present interactions between petrol capitalism and the earth. Yet, there are lighter moments, such as the four-to-the-floor woozy groove of ‘Beetroot Train’ and the second on ‘Ah’ when a waterfowl honks much closer to the microphone than all its comrades. What's more, despite the association between Jeck and so-called ‘hauntology’, none of that genre-not-genre's usual uncanny nostalgia (think The Caretaker or Jeck's own Vinyl Coda (2000–2001)) creeps into Oxmardyke. Whilst Jeck was apparently inspired ‘the ancient history of the area from 6th century Anglo-Saxon times to the Knights Templar’,³ and this does come through in earthy churnings of ‘Drum’, the record feels surprisingly present and urgent. Perhaps, this is Watson's recordings, which so brilliantly capture the location that Jeck never entirely allows us to be present in. It is the crossing between these two composers, their complimentary and contrasting aesthetics, which allow Oxmardyke to shine as a knot of many crossings, a record, a farewell (to Jeck and to the now defunct Oxmardyke gate box), and an ecological warning.