ON VANISHING
LAND
In an era of digital abundance when so many files on
so many USB sticks and so many hard drives are ready
to be downloaded and copied and WeTransferred and
Dropboxed, since 2013, On Vanishing Land’s selfimposed inaccessibility has systematically thwarted the
habitual expectations of availability that organise the
structures of listening under conditions of contemporary
communicative capitalism. Even though its playback
only required an email requesting permission from
Mark and from Justin, its non-existence on YouTube or
Vimeo or Soundcloud or Bandcamp was, and is, enough
to inconvenience the compulsory right to the digital
object that organizes the drives, desires and demands
of dividuality. Constraining the conditions under which
On Vanishing Land could be experienced was not a
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matter of creating an art world demand for a rare or
precious experience. It was a calculated strategy that
was conceived and designed to generate a context of care
around a work whose unidentifiable audio objectivity
borders on and dwells within the oneiric borderlands of
the mix, the aeonic consistency of the audio-essay and
the temporal collapse of the sonic fiction.
The egress that On Vanishing Land engineers requires
specific preconditions that can be characterised as the
construction of a constrained condition for collective
concentrated listening. To assemble an operative portal
to the outside entails the manufacture, the holding and
the sustenance of a specific bloc of space-time. How
difficult, after all, could it be to invite Londoners
to gather at a certain moment for a certain time in a
certain space? Listening to the aesthetic sociality of
listening to an unidentifiable audio object, however, felt
and continues to feel, at odds with and disruptive of
the protocols presupposed by a club, the satisfactions
expected from an exhibition, the norms implied by a gig,
the behaviours required by a party and the conventions
demanded by the cinema screening. Absent these genrespecific prerequisites, the experience of attending a
playback of On Vanishing Land assumes the aspect of
a tournament that plays out within and against oneself.
A sense emerges from within and takes hold of you,
with an urgency that persists to the extent that it remains
unvoiced. A sense of volunteering oneself, proudly, for
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a test and a trial. Of challenging oneself, gladly. Of
aligning oneself, nobly, with a programme. Allying
oneself with a project that is grand and grave. Of
acquitting oneself with glory. Of fighting the good fight.
Facing forward. Opening oneself, ardently, to feelings
of valour that you hardly know what to do with. And
this sense of going to war on the plane of art and
inside the field of aesthetics, persists to the extent that
On Vanishing Land summons active forces that it
orchestrates against reactive forces that it never names
but which are all too audible. What this conflict invokes,
in turn, is not the recollection of sitting on the floor at
The Showroom, back hunched, listening to the Genelec
loud speakers from which Mark’s voice emerges in its
cold-rationalist tonality, rising above the reverberant
haze of John Foxx’s piano, Gazelle Twin’s eldritch
chants and Justin’s aristocratically accentuated accent.
Instead, it summons temporal spirals that drag the worktime matrix of the Gregorian calendar into circular
causalities in which the listening sessions organised
by Mark at Goldsmiths throughout 2015 appear
before the first collective listening to London Under
London at Gasworks in early 2009 and the voice of
Mark can be heard reading Plan for the Assassination
of Princess Anne. He smiles. And this structure of
feeling, inarticulate and inchoate, searching for collective
expression, concentrates itself inside of the collective
listening to On Vanishing Land. Constraining this
structure of feeling in turn produces a mode of recursion
that is not so much a communism of spectatorship as a