Robin Mackay

Following on from Mark Fisher & Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land and Kode9’s Astro-Darien, the third release on Flatline, Hyperdub’s sub label for audio essays and sonic fiction, is By the North Sea by Robin Mackay, philosopher and founder of the UK publisher Urbanomic. 

The project is a sonic exploration of the perplexities of time, disappearance, and loss, channelled through the fictions of H.P. Lovecraft, the speculative mythos of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), and the ghost of Dunwich—a once prosperous English trading city now lost almost wholly to the sea. Described by Mackay as a ‘radio play afflicted by ontological rot’, the audio essay interweaves field recordings, recovered video footage, voice performance, and original music. The voices of Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, actors Peter Marinker and Phyllida Nash, Angus Carlyle, Lisa Blanning, diver Stuart Bacon, and Morgan Caines of Dunwich Museum, loop and twist around Mackay’s narration in a dense, multi-levelled sonic hyperstition that lends itself to repeated listening.

Mackay began writing By The North Sea in 2017 in the week immediately following the death of Mark Fisher, returning to the archives of a project that he and Mark had embarked upon in 2001, with the themes of the original ‘Dunwich Project’ taking on a new character in the wake of Fisher’s death, and becoming a device for asking questions about finality, about things that could now never happen, about the possibility of continuing, and about a distanced friendship marked by depressive absences and constantly deferred promises to spend time together.

 

The ‘definitively unfinished’ version of a project that does not, has not, and never will exist, By The North Sea tells of the search for a mode of time where nothing passes definitively and everything can, with the correct procedures, be accessed, re-synthesised, and recast. In a series of resonating narratives across different moments in time (1949, 1968, 2001, 2017), characters including anthropologist Echidna Stillwell, time-travelling professor Randolph Templeton, Lovecraft, and Fisher and Mackay themselves emerge and are submerged in turn, swirling continually around the conceptual figure of Dunwich, as their search takes on the character of a repetition compulsion–a collective return to the site of an impersonal trauma.