James Joys

My friend Jamie who’s a PhD student at Newcastle University came and did a lecture for our electroacoustic module today. His work is so interesting, I love it. He describes himself with this: ‘Hertzflung throo th’ casual-moss at the wheeeeel aft a wee sprechtship wi’ tha wrought manwelt , a flash of dddrrrams, my schallemele and a hollow’d skin machine’ which is bizarre, but when you know him and his music, it makes total sense…!

He’s done a project called ‘Surrogate City’ which explores the idea of the city being taken away from us with grand yet wholly empty plans of regeneration and his album ‘Glyphic Bloom’ is an experiment into the concept of reclaiming the city in some way. He made field recordings at six sites round Newcastle and then mixed them, making them into tracks for the album.

You can find a wooden plaque at each of these sites with a spectrogram of the track and a QR code which links you to his website where you can download the music and read all about this work. He encourages people to mix and edit and incorporate the tracks into their own work and then to upload them. Each of the tracks also has a ‘Dub Fiction’ which he wrote about the site they were made from and brings together descriptions of the music and site together into a short story-type idea. There’s also a ‘Future Relic’ which is a satirical broadcast in the future describing what has happened to the area.

His concepts are so interesting and his graphics, photography and cinematography that he’s done for the project are beautiful. Get involved: http://www.surrogatecity.com