The sun burned high like a ship sailing across sleeping clouds on the horizon. A fresh summer wind blew across the moorland with a crookedness which threw my heart further out of loop. I stretched out my wings and felt for rain and also for a sense of which way to go.

​

Without following a desire path nor heading toward a particular landmark, I had been walking on Bodmin Moor for several hours collecting field recordings. Beginning at the Hurlers Stone Circles, I eventually found myself avoiding a wide stretch of peat bog by descending a gorse-coated hill when I spotted an unfamiliar stone relic up ahead.

 

Neither an engine house nor an old outbuilding, I paused at a set of crumbling steps that led to several piles of stone which had wild olive-green tendrils sidewinding in between numerous cracks. I thought I heard an echo of someone calling out from a ring of scree just ahead of me. The steps led to a collapsed outer wall which resembled a jagged smile, revealing the guts of some sort of Iron Age ruin. Edging sideways through a 10-foot fissure, I gingerly entered the open stone scar and disappeared into the side of the hill.

 

On the other side of the granite fracture, I was introduced to a windy vestibule with walls of running water leading to a tight rock passageway. A series of slightly curved ridges were cut into the ground, resembling to my eyes a spectrum view of ascending tones on a linear frequency scale. The uninterrupted flow of the falling water formed whispers which I took as permission to continue on through.

 

Ahead of me was a corridor of rock winking with flecks of tin and covered in a lime green moss brightly singing a Shepard tone I recognised as E minor. The combined voices of the moss blossomed in the cave and as I squeezed through stalagmites and ducked between dripping stalactites, I sensed a boulder beginning to grow large in the pit of my stomach.

 

As I strayed further forwards, shifting through similar looking passageway after passageway, the tunnel seemed to eat time and I began to lose sense of direction in the shadows. pystri ylow. Could this be part of an old mining system? Had I somehow entered into the bowels of Stowes Hill and chanced upon a long-abandoned trail? The only constant was the drone that beckoned me forwards.

 

In the dappled low light, I began to spot strange creatures living alongside the Kernow language etched into the walls. Wild horses, seals, otters, deer, a flying chough. Others were more mystical: I recognised a depiction of Saint Tue and Uther the giant, a minotaur figure, a circle of piskies, the mermaid of Zennor. Rock shards spearing the increasingly damp ground started to take on human forms, of animals and local landmarks, too. Of miners, of moles. I saw miniature engine houses and the granite Cheesewring stacks, even a version of the small cave once inhabited by Daniel Gumb who I knew had studied Euclid.

 

As I walked and listened more intently to the weighty drone – was it even tugging at the 432Hz sleeve? – I thought I was attending a private performance of an alternate Kernow exhibition of La Monte Young’s Dream House installation. A Trance Cave. I acknowledged the increasing pull of the monophonic effect and questioned what could be the burden of this drone? I temporarily closed my eyes and saw dancing dust motes or maybe flying bats. I looked up and saw a marbled moon hanging above me. I walked on slowly, open-mouthed, discovering I held the desire to swallow this moon and the invisible sound waves apparently pouring out from its glow. pystri ylow.

 

After heading through yet another passageway, the subterranean space suddenly widened into a circular void where I felt like I was standing within the very heart of the drone. Surrounding me were rock statues – menhirs pointing to the hidden sky – engraved with anthropomorphic figures and mathematical symbols. t = y / (x + 1)

 

I could hear voices hidden in the drone grow louder, deeper and stranger. I took out my audio recorder from my pocket and hit record. The animal etchings on the walls began to glisten and vibrate – pipistrelles darted into holes in old trees, a marsh harrier swooped over wetlands, a pair of adders hid in sun-dried leaf litter.

 

An energy from the earth below me began to transfer up and travel through my body – my feet, knees, stomach, throat, ears. The standing stones around me began to rock in situ, rubbing abrasively against their anchor points until they were freed and fell forwards in unison, tumbling to the ground and flooding the chamber with an intense white light. I instinctively shielded my eyes and in doing so stumbled, lost my footing on wet rock and I remembered falling.

 

There once was an age when there was nothing before it. No land to stand on, no sea to swim in. Nothing as much as grass or corn, or woman or man, or beast, bird or fish. 

 

Earth and the other planets were yet to even be imaginable. No idea of heaven, no hell, no middle. Everything is and just was. Nothing and everything simultaneously present and not present. A giant void. A yawning gap. 

 

Over billions of years, this void gradually became filled with a mist in what became known as the north and that grew into an immensity of ice, which birthed rain, geothermal drones and labyrinthine cave systems. While the southern part of the void became lit by fire, glistening lichen and bogs, natural springs and sprawling roots and branches. 

 

The two halves of the void soon noticed their differences and began to react and then fight. From out of this enduring battle, emerged a third state that eventually led to the creation of the Earth. Plants and animals were born, humankind and kin then followed. 

 

In the presence of this new growth, the yawning void was slowly marginalised and forced to retreat back into the cracks and crevices in rock faces and caves, inside mountains and down wells, in hidden springs and lost rivers, behind walled states and in dark spaces below the ground, where it had to lay dormant, waiting to be called.

​

​

​

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

A sudden storm of vertigo had brought on visions of a raging sea, as if I was on-board a clipper ship housed on the orlop deck, where I had been instructed to rest and whittle away the great tide of uncertainty I held inside of me, until such a time that I arrived at the end of the horizon where I found the climax of the reverberating drone.

 

Wiping away an organic mask made from saturated lichen from my forehead, I got back up onto my feet and recovered my recorder which had fallen out of my hand. Noticing a source of light from out of the gloaming, I scrambled up a nearby slope covered in twisted weeds and loose pebbles. I was covered in mud. After a short climb I was soon standing back beneath the open sky, now tinged with noctilucent clouds. Several hours must have passed. It was twilight. I could hear sheep bleating close by.

 

I stopped the audio recording and began listening back to the saved file. It began sounding like a lost Basinski tape loop formed from microscopic flecks of static. After several moments listening to heavy saturated silence, patterns of damp distortions started dancing in the dark, gradually being pushed further into the red to evoke extreme levels of ambient noise wall. I braced myself against a boulder and tried to pick out emerging details from the wild static, as if I was attempting to capture a single still frame from a Brakhage film in my mind. A low thrumming became present, rapidly rising and falling in pitch, before being punctured by incessant chirping and squeaking oscillating around that familiar sharp Shepard tone.

 

I hastily stopped the recording before the volume grew to be unbearable, when all light was drained from the moors. I looked up to locate the moon to recalibrate my bearings but from out of the ether emerged a black ship formed from a colony of bats. And then the heavens divided and released a sharp, summer evening downpour. The Shepard tone seemed to continue to mature in intensity, even though I had learnt in class that this could only be an auditory illusion giving the impression the tone was continually ascending in pitch. But the theory did not match with the experience.

 

Noticing a hole in my shoe, I staggered against the addition of an assertive side wind and headed out into the silver rain away from a small crop of stones. These fresh environmental elements added extra layers of density to the drone circling around my temples, as if it had become louder but also more nuanced at the same time. 

 

My stomach felt empty and for a moment I was as hungry as the giant I had spotted etched into one of the cave walls. I instinctively reached into my pocket to see if I had any snacks left and was surprised when I pulled out a pebble I must have collected in the cavern system – a blushed pink stone in the shape of a jagged flame. Somewhere a solitary rook cawed on the heath.

I hiked for another unknown period but no matter which direction I thought I was travelling in I could not escape the drone ringing out across the landscape, which seemed to radiate from all directions. Could you hear it too? That continuous Shepard-Risset glissando? Or was it Shepard Madness? A recovered buried memory? Grazing horses and sheep were apparently unperturbed by the drone as I walked on by.

 

And then I heard somewhere out in the distance, perhaps at an event I could imagine taking place at Goldiggins quarry, a solstice chant chorus reverberating across the tor like a singing bowl. The sun is not lost; it will rise again.

 

After a few minutes of recording the ethereal experience just in case it might become useful in a future piece of sound work, I had no choice but to continue onwards. It was getting very late and I didn’t want to have to spend the night on the moors. Once again hitting record and accompanied by the constant ringing drone that had now become my invisible aura, I began walking next to a glowing trail of bracken, still tracking the Porthcurno ghost ship sailing across the sky.