Bram Thomas Arnold.
Sometime in November. (Or level 11 of the gauntlet that is 2020, as someone put it lately).
In January, we met in a café, nothing out of the ordinary, to talk about the sound of extinction, the noises we might be losing day to day, echoes in time, vanishing without a trace. Before I left I slipped a copy Franz J Broswimmer’s Ecocide: A short history of the mass extinction of species across the table. A book I bought in Oxford whilst an undergrad in 2002 or so, studying ecology and fine art, its aged well, its relevance, rarely dimmed, described as “essential for anyone who cares about conserving our environment for the future” the book highlighted the significance of the loss of biodiversity as one of the most significant issues of our time long before anyone uttered the phrase ‘the sixth mass extinction’.
Jodie wanted to create a library of extinct sounds, distributed across the public spaces of Plymouth, presented in books as tomes and tonal maps of an archive. The sound of a city and all those fractured noises we might be losing. By February it became apparent the recent emergence of a new virus may considerably change things. By March Jodie felt a bit ill and cancelled our meeting on the morning I was due to travel to Plymouth from Cornwall. I turned away from the platform and walked home. Little did any of us know at the time that that would be such a significant cancellation. I didn’t get on a train again until November. As we shunted into April and the first national lockdown so many noises suddenly vanished, whilst so many others suddenly emerged from beneath the detritus of late capitalism, bird song in city centres, the disappearance of the background hum of planes in the sky or the distant ever rumble of the A30 in a Cornish valley.
I never saw Jodie again, we moved our work online, we all did.
Around the same time I started working with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, particularly examining the impacts of biodiversity loss. Jodie turned her project from a physically distributed archive of extinct sounds, to a fictive collaboration with Plymouth’s past, and a collaborative engagement with its future through her extant work with Noiselab.
We talked about how fiction in art holds the capacity to mirror unspoken truths about the world.
We talked about Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Dr. Tom Richard’s recent work and the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra...
We talked about Jamie Shovlin’s fictive post-punk band Lustfaust…
We talked about how and when audiences might encounter such an archival project, through fan clubs, subscriptions, zines, badges, stickers, events...
We talked about the Athenaeum, public callouts for information about Joan in shop windows, little adverts in the back of the NME back in the day, how to insert fiction into real life…
We talked about Joan Lyneham, a historic figure that Jodie was concocting, and about ways of embedding her in the reality of Plymouth’s past and the wider past of electronic music and feminist invention.
We talked about how the work might transcend the temporal strictures of a festival in September, how it might bleed out into the future and keep reinventing itself as an event, a cassette, a record, a walk on Dartmoor…
We’re still talking…
Jodie started to amalgamate her work with Noise Lab with this lost history of pioneering women in electronic music. She also started selling bespoke Casio cover versions on request through social media as a way of evading the lockdown doldrums. She drew in friends and co-conspirators - a website friend here, a bookmaking friend there, her Noise Lab crew. We talked about authorship and the capacity for art to transcend the structural logic of market forces, to reinvent forms of economy that are based on and drawn from community rather than consumption. We talked about the Plymouth Art Weekender as a form of communal invention, a net made of knots holding the city, and each of us as a knot in a net, responsible for holding it up for others, for making it work, for making work of it, for crafting it gently into being.
And we did occasionally still talk about extinction, and all the sounds we’re losing and gaining all the time as part of this sixth mass extinction, and how that thought had a part to play in her work on the Joan Lyneham archive, part of this performance of fictive history in the real present.
Mentoring Jodie was my first formal encounter with mentoring and I found it a fantastic proposition, and Jodie a thoughtful and open collaborator, a true artist, and despite the zoom-bound nature of our present existence I look forward to seeing what Joan Lyneham gets up to next, where she pops up, how she mutates, who re-members her, what traces of her fictive past begin to solidify as fragmented traces, myths and stories in the communal present of Plymouth’s live music scene…