I think the greatest visionary work in English music...

[haptalaon]

One of the Landweirdiest things about Penda's Fen - one of the things that struck me as important, unaccountably important, was that it was screened once in 1973 and then lived on only in memory. It's a dense text. It rewards rewatching. Nontheless, for over 30 years, it belonged only to those who saw it and fragmentarily.

This wasn't within the material, it was a characteristic of the material itself - and this is how I came to think of Gods, an essential part of Fencraft - that the lostness is part of what they are now.

Hmmm, like Susan Schuppli's Material Witness - a harrowing academic text which scratches a delicious itch in my brain, the sensation of discovering a new way of thinking. Schuppli talks about the physicality of the recording medium itself in various social horrors - photographs, telephoned transmissions, gaps in taps, radioactive water. It's sort of like, The Stone Tape as geopolitics - so immediately appealing to me. The book is a hard read because, of course, it includes photographs - as well it should, because the book is about witnessing and recording media as material evidence and of course, my instinct as a reader to want to turn away from these images is participating in her argument.

Anyway, then sometime in the 90s or 10s - I forget which - Penda's Fen was screened again - once. It already had this mystic allure, as semi-lost media (and for a film to survive the BBC from the 1970s is by no means a sure thing. My heart breaks for David Rudkin's first television play, The Stone Dance, about a pastor coming to town and having an encounter with a teen who's having a gay crisis with the standing stones - wherever it went)

And so by that point we had VHS, and that's how Penda survived the next decade, passed hand to hand on increasingly battered tapes, in which the battery was part of the charm. You know this is mythic. Eventually, that one VHS copy made it to youtube. I know this because the booklet that came with my DVD talks about it - and that at the climax of the film, the very tape begins to give out, as if the medium can no longer contain the unearthly vibrations being unleashed.

And now it's on DVD, at last, which diminishes some of the charm of all that, but it does mean it's easier to see - which you should, not for religious reasons but because it is a masterpiece.

I say all this because I just stumbled upon these dopey graphics I made in the archives of my file system, and because some sneaky bastard has slipped it onto the Internet Archive for all to see.