Bulverhythe Variations

It caught my eye, I frankly admit, because just over a year ago my sister moved to Bulverhythe (the most westerly part of St Leonards on Sea). 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/01/epiphany.html

But the more important word in the title is Variations. In its first iteration, the book published by Silverhill Press in 2022, the variations are Elaine Edwards' 32 photographic images, mostly of Bulverhythe beach architecture like the railway footbridge seen here. A starved landscape in many ways, especially in the early morning during lockdown. But nature, in the form of skies, moist air, surface rust and shingle plants, is one aspect of how variations come about. Others arise from the angles of each shot, from the implied movement and the vision that the artist conceives and attracts on a particular day. So we are made to grasp at the infinity in variation, at the same time appreciating the taut limits of this selection. 

In its other iteration, a Reality Street CD (also 2022), Bulverhythe Variations is eleven of Elaine's keyboard variations. You can hear some or perhaps all of them here:

https://afritnebula.bandcamp.com/album/bulverhythe-variations

The keyboard pieces change continuously in ways that can be seen as variations but are not readily assimilable to classical variation form. There must be many closer and more recent analogies, but I was strangely reminded of Mompou's Cants màgics, or of Satie in his more clanging manner. (Elaine's keyboard is most often piano-like, and though these pieces are often strongly rhythmic they are not metronomic or dynamically fixed.)

Both artworks are complete and independent statements, but I did enjoy experiencing them together.

They are also connected by accompanying, or being accompanied by, three texts by Elaine's partner Ken, written in the subtly styled prose that he has also deployed in e.g. a book with no name (Shearsman, 2016). This prose accompaniment sets other streams of variation flowing sideways from the main narrative successions of images and music.  

Here's the extract from the first of Ken's texts, Something Happened, that appears in the pages I photographed above:

There is almost constant wind here, where we sit or stand or lie,

and it is chiefly blowing from the direction of the south-west,

that is the prevailing direction, though sometimes (as a change) easterly,

and one has to endure it, or make provision against it, or go with it,

as is appropriate at any particular instant; for sometimes it's mild,

it softens the cheeks, glorious to relate, and sometimes it's horrid,

but that's how it goes.

It goes and it happens. That is, it sings. It sings as it sounds.

And we sit or stand or lie in our quarters,

which are partially sheltered, it has to be said, which will do.

We are in media res, which is Latin for in the middle of it all,

or in the middle of nowhere.

We are discovered here, or we are in a position to be discovered,

but to be quite frank we hope not to be,

we hope to continue our life with as little fuss as possible.