About

I have been undertaking a 3 month residency at the Cité Internationales des Arts, in Paris. These are the scrawlings, scratchings and imaginings that are arising. All is a draft, a first pass, a moment in process.

I am here on a few missions. One is to try and read some of Pierre Schaeffer’s papers that are in an archive in Caen. The list of the boxes alone is 600 pages. It’s not that I am devotee but I’ve come to appreciate how so much of what we do began with him. Not that we have to always know this to begin. But sometimes, after beginning, we seek ancestry, or deeper understanding. And it seems Schaeffer says many of the things I discovered along the way myself. That is what he describes — a process of finding for yourself. But then what happens when you verify your findings with someone else — does it take away from your own intuition — the notion as original argument. This all sounds way too scientific, like PS sometimes does, analysing down to the groove and grain, but that is all part of the story. This is not Schaeffer’s story but mine, in the process of thinking through and with him. All of this sounds very presumptuous… 

I am also here to meet people connected with my thinking and research on writing creatively about sound and have journeyed to Berlin and Copenhagen to do so. The more formal writings arising from this and interview transcripts will appear online in a different format at some stage as part of a larger research project.

Over the years I have generally resisted the urge to do the more spontaneous daily form of blog as I am afraid of my own tendency to overshare and find my responses to the quotidian far more fascinating that what another reader may. But I have also been trying to redefine my relationship with writing — trying to approach it without struggle — and so I have written a lot while I’m here on a range of topics. For better or worse, or maybe just to aid my own memory of this time in the future I am sharing a large proportion of these scribblings.

In reality I don’t expect people to read it, but I need a public outcome to make myself commit to a form, even if rough, for things.

I’ve been waiting to have a significant body of entries before I hit publish, but I am still retrospectively adding pieces from early on in my time here, so it will keep growing in a kind of mixed up chronology—that is I retrospectively date the entries from when I originally wrote them, not from when I put them on the blog.

That’s enough excuses and explanations.

If you need to know more about me go here to my official website.
www.gailpriest.net