Release: April 19th
The record is simultaneously situated in a wider landscape inspired both by J.G. Ballard’s short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ and Abraham Cruzvillegas’ sculpture ‘Empty Lot’, each of which seek to locate hope in the face of an existential situation: for Ballard the ‘psychic zero’ of the post-nuclear atolls of the South Pacific on his protagonist and for Cruzvillegas, the life force-crippling machinations of internationalism. Add to these the maxim of Fredric Jameson popular amongst the techno elite of Silicon Valley, that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”, and it would seem that what remains of our role as humans has been reduced to the proffering of ever-more transcendental dogmas in the face of a plague of normalisation. As Luciano Floridi notes in his analysis of our future relationship to AI, “we are exceptional only insofar as we are successfully dysfunctional”.
‘This is My Private Beach, This is My Jetsam’ thus invites us to consider a world where the ‘psychic zero’ of hypercapitalism leads to a necessary bricolage or ‘autoconstrucción’ from ‘first principles’, wherein trial, error and chance are as instructive as anything resembling logical articulation or discourse. The spirit of the ‘savant’, then, riotously informs the record’s sonic fingerprint, unfurling a would-be symphony in the style of Jean Dubuffet: a ‘desert island disc’ begat by benighted digital natives.
Sam Britton: This Is My Private Beach, This Is My Jetsam CD not applicable 043/DL;
All music composed and performed by Sam Britton.
Tracks:
Written & produced by Sam Britton, 2015-2018. Mixed by Sam Britton & Will Worsley at Coda to Coda, London. Mastered by Peter Beckmann at Technology Works, London.
‘Atoll Song’ & ‘Eb-Ub-Ob-Aa’ feature the voice of Kip Britton.
The title “This Is My Private Beach, This Is My Jetsam” is borrowed from a text by Ted Milton, with kind permission:
“She spent a fortune on lipstick on me | A pig was impaled beneath the floorboards | The palace retainers turn face-to-the-wall | My daughter Maud fell to the ground in fear | We left his name carved in a corner stone | In the face of death he experienced desire | They threw the switch on the Radnorshire hillside | Serpents slid from the folds in the curtains | A shaman was peddling The Book Of The Dead | Sinking into the vertiginous mire | Through the mist of a pavilion of lies | This is my private beach | This is my Jetsam”