The Norwood Variations

Drew Mulholland

Drew Mulholland - The Norwood Variations

The Norwood Variations is an expanded and remastered edition of Drew’s self-released 2014 edition.

An Interview with Drew Mulholland by John Pilgrim

Drew Mulholland has been hailed as the ‘avant-garde godfather of hauntology and psychogeography’. He is the creative force behind the cult band Mount Vernon Arts Lab, sonic explorer extraordinaire of subterranean currents and ‘Composer in Residence’ at the University of Glasgow’s School of Geographical and Earth Sciences.

I meet Drew Mulholland late one June afternoon at the gates of the University of Glasgow. We head across a looming gothic courtyard, take a detour via the strange wonders of the Department of Zoology’s museum and weave our way up a turret staircase to begin our conversation in his office. Despite the other-worldly aspects that might be associated with Drew’s fields of interest, I quickly discover that Drew’s manner is personable and refreshingly down to earth. I open up the interview by observing that Folk Horror Revival shares a fascination for many of the themes that are close to his work and wonder whether he recognises that he is part of an evolving dynamic that is starting to connect a growing number of writers and artists.

Drew Mulholland: ‘Oh, completely. This was apparent when I went down to The Alchemical Landscape at Cambridge University. I remember saying to the organiser at the time, “We’re on to something here”. The next week there was that great article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian that mentioned the symposium. They were expecting about 20 papers but had to stop at 100. Then there is the “Exploring the Extraordinary” conference that is coming up at York at the end of the year. And of course, there’s the Ghost Box label. It’s clear that something is happening now—a current, if you like. I wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t something in the air, something to plug into.’

These reference points spark further associations and connections of significance to the release of Drew’s most recent recording ‘The Norwood Variations’. I go on to ask Drew about the stimulus for this and his recorded work more generally.

DM: ‘Since the late ’90’s I’ve been investigating the notion that sound can somehow free the past and subsequently, under certain conditions, memories and impressions can be realised.

‘From very early on the inspiration has always been to a greater or lesser extent the landscape. When I was recording ambient sounds around Mount Vernon in Glasgow and fashioning them into primitive tape loops, the sense of capturing a “moment” at a certain place and the memory that the associated playback might trigger has always been a part of what I do.

‘Norwood”s title came from the abandoned Victorian villa that stood behind my primary school. Received wisdom told us that if we stared long enough at a particular first floor window we would eventually be rewarded with a glimpse of the “Norwood Phantom”. So that was the starting point for me… evocative site-specific memory.’

While Drew’s oeuvre is characterised by the use of electronica, tape loops and dark rumbling drones, The Norwood Variations is primarily a short album of exquisite chamber music, with three of the compositions performed by The Edinburgh Quartet. Of the tracks ‘Geographia Mundi’ is perhaps closest to the concerns that will be of interest to Folk Horror aficionados. Echoing an underlying preoccupation of how the ancient past shapes how we encounter circumstances in the present, ‘Geographia Mundi’ is based on the discovery of witchcraft and Latin texts in the university library that explore the primary principles of map-making. The track, ‘A Psychogeographical Reading’, is a spoken word performance (by Paul McGann), and I wonder whether there was a particular impetus for its inclusion.

DM: ‘The development of the spoken word piece was interesting. Originally the text was simply meant for the programme notes for my first concert at the University, but as I was writing I could “hear” an actor friend of mine reciting it, so much so in fact that I removed some phrases that I could imagine him repeating. I contacted him and he kindly agreed to record it for me. When it came to the session I was in the next room wearing headphones and holding a copy of the script, and to actually hear the words, meter and phrasing aloud exactly as I imagined them was more than a little spooky.’

The passing of time between The Norwood Variations and Drew’s earlier recordings leads us onto a discussion of a flickering awareness of psychogeographic and other hidden currents over time and between different generations. We talk also about ‘time slips’ as Drew recalls speaking recently to a woman who had been travelling on the underground in Glasgow.

DM: ‘Arriving at the top of the escalator she reached down to get something from her bag and on looking up discovered that she had walked into the middle of a drama set recreating a scene from 100 years ago. She looked again and the historical setting had disappeared. She was in the middle of modern-day Glasgow.’

Underground stations are clearly an area of fascination for Drew, and he is soon relaying tales of a conversation with a guy who worked in the late 1970s on the modernisation of St George’s Cross and Cowcaddens Street. A number of unsettling occurrences had been reported by drivers working in this locale.

DM: ‘I took the opportunity to research this further and discovered that St George’s Cross was built over a seam of coal which had been mined by monks in the Middle Ages, which in turn was later to become the location for 18th-century plague pits.’

The conversation leads back to a more personal story of Drew’s childhood growing up in Mount Vernon in Glasgow, ‘a place of bomb shelters, wheat fields, abandoned railways and breakers’ yards’. Drew proceeds to tell a remarkable story of when his album was reviewed by David Keenan in The Wire.
DM: ‘David is one of the journalists from The Wire and has lived in London for years. They gave him my album to listen to and asked him to interview me. He phoned me up and said, “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about your album that really reminds me of where I grew up.” And I said, “Your name’s David Keenan?” And he said, “Yeah”, and I said, “Your dad’s Tommy Keenan, isn’t he? You grew up in Mount Vernon, didn’t you?” The house that he grew up in as a boy was literally across from our house. He said, “I don’t know what it was; it just really reminded me of our estate.” There is no way he would have known this, yet somehow the associations which were conveyed in the recording were sufficiently vivid for him to make this direct connection back to this very specific time and place. That was a strange one, but one of many.’


The notion that music and sound can disrupt our sense of temporality and briefly reconfigure our relationship with landscape and place is one that surfaces in various guises during our conversation. I mention to Drew a recent experience of walking along the banks of the River Wear and hearing Brian Eno’s ‘By This River’. Not only was I taken back to the first time when I first heard this song, but in that moment I had a sense of how this particular location had subtly but inexorably pulled me forward to be at this same riverside point in some 20 years later. Such recollections prompt Drew to share a range of much stranger and more deeply coincidental stories associated with his psychogeographic and hauntological investigations. One such story links together the discovery of an abandoned reel of cassette tape discovered by a roadside, Hogarth’s theory of ‘The Line of Beauty’ and a recent walk through the East End of Glasgow. Noting the uncanny and unsettling aspects of such stories, Drew reflects more generally on the risk of becoming immersed in the deeper currents of psychogeography:
DM: ‘I am assuming most people come to it knowing nothing. You will pick up signs and signifiers. But you also need to get a grip: You’re not getting messages from supernatural forces. It’s a very powerful thing, but you need to go into and out of it again. Understanding psychogeography and hauntology is like catching smoke; you can’t pin the experience down and analyse it on a lab bench. It’s a subjective experience and is as much an inner journey as an outer one. You need to be careful so you don’t become completely immersed. If this is all you are concerned with, you will end up in a very strange place. It’s good to remember that you’ve got to get dinner ready and get the washing on!’

The inherently subjective and fluid nature of the psychogeographic/hauntological praxis prompts a discussion about the academic standing of such areas of investigation. Formerly a member of the Psychology Department at Glasgow Caledonian University, Drew’s continuing appointment as ‘Composer in Residence’ in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences is a clear endorsement of the relevance of his work to established fields of inquiry. While the Geography School provides a natural home for Drew, he has also worked with the Music Department and has been working with colleagues in the department of Astrophysics. Most recently he has been busy reconfiguring scientific-artistic boundaries through using a 19th-century Earth magnetic receiver given to him by the Astrophysics department to produce six ‘time stretched’ recordings of the natural frequencies emanating from the Earth. Drew mentions that some of these recordings were made in a Neolithic burial chamber in West Lothian, and I remark upon what an unusual listening experience that must be.

The notion of ‘time stretching’ is one that surfaces at various points in our conversation. As we digress to discuss musical influences, Drew shows me a personal letter he received posthumously from John Balance (aka Geoff Rushton), founding member of Coil. A particular line jumps out from the page: ‘There is no time; the future is an invention of over-complicated apes’. He recalls an exchange with Balance in which the Coil musician talked about his experience of Chaos Magick, expressing surprise that Drew was not familiar with what being a Chaos Magician entailed since he naturally assumed he was one. Appropriately enough, at this point our conversation spirals into a seemingly chaotic vortex of diverse but interconnected reference points. The energy of psychogeographic and hauntological current that animates Drew’s world is palpable. There is no endpoint, only a spiral of further connections to be explored. The current is humming: Plug yourself in. 

tracklisting

1. Sycamore 05:38
2. Geographica Mundi 03:13
3. Stella Nova 08:52
4. The Differential Equation 01:03
5. A Psychogeographical Reading 04:44
6. Gangen 02:26
7. Mettlemen 03:27
8. Memory & Mind 05:02
9. From A Fallow Field 05:20

credits

The Norwood Variations:
Strings – The Edinburgh Quartet
Vocals – Madrigirls
Oboe – Siobhan Parker
Piano – Jennifer MacRitchie
Xylophone, Percussion – Jemma Knox
Narration – Paul McGann
Co producer – John Cavanagh

All tracks written by Drew Mulholland