Our Day, 1938 by Wallace Kelly. Score by Rachel Grimes. Courtesy of the Center for Home Movies and Martha Kelly. Filmed in Lebanon, Kentucky

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My book in the company of Mikhail Bulgakov.  In Waterstones Ealing as part of their ‘recommended reads’ section.

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“How nice is the sound of a horse passing by…”

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EN “Blood” (Excerpt)

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In June I helped my brother with visuals for Duane Pitre’s performance of Feel Free at Cafe Oto, London.  Using live microscope feeds of various organic materials, we performed the visuals in real-time with the music.  The above video is an excerpt from the show, blending our live visuals with footage of Pitre’s sextet performance.  The audio is also a live recording from the night.

More info: Duane Pitre / Shaun Crook / Cafe Oto / Important Records

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Recording setup for the forthcoming Mavis Beacon album. In a Devonshire shed with Shaun Crook, Alex Delfont & Darren Clark.

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From the album Xerrox Vol. 2 by Alva Noto [Raster Noton, 2009]

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Here’s an important date for aspiring novelists: Friday 3rd August. It is the deadline for submissions to the 2012 Luke Bitmead Writers’ Bursary, the award I won last year for Sleeping Patterns. It is now the largest award for unpublished novels in the UK, with a substantial cash bursary and publishing contract as the prize. It is free to enter and open to anyone with a completed manuscript. In other words, you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The bursary is run by Elaine Hanson, mother of Luke Bitmead, a young writer who died tragically in 2006, and Legend Press. It was devised to support aspiring writers whose personal circumstances are making it difficult for them to realise their potential.  The winning novels from the past four years represent a diverse range of adult fiction, from straight-up genre fiction, through to literary fiction and experimental, so all types of writing are encouraged equally.   You can be sure that whichever novel the judges choose as their winner this year, it will be something unexpected.  My personal view however, is that this bursary is especially valuable to writers who want to try something a little different, something experimental or even progressive, something that disregards the trends of a nervous industry. It offers all writers a level playing field, irrespective of their work’s potential marketability.  So you are free to try something that you never dared before, free to forget what your Creative Writing teacher said, because after all, literature is nothing if not a celebration of freedom.

Details on how to enter can be found HERE (but be quick!).  You can also read Elaine’s blog about the bursary HERE.

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Here are some photos of the final copies of my novel, Sleeping Patterns, which my publisher received back from the printer last week.  They have thick and satisfying matt-finish covers that feel a bit like a waxed lemon.  I’m really pleased with how they’ve turned out.

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Lawrence English – Kiri No Oto [Digitalis, 2011]

Originally released in 2008 on CD, this conceptual masterpiece of sustained drones and layered tones was recently given a well-deserved vinyl pressing and is now sounding more essential than ever. ‘Kiri No Oto’, which translates as ‘The Sound of Fog’, does exactly what its title and artwork implies; it conjures up images of foggy seascapes. Encompassing a broad palette of sounds, it is a dense and enveloping record that moves through washes of noise without ever losing sight of its emotional undercurrents.           LP [100 white, 400 black] / CD / Digital.

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