The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum in Lisbon

The latest episode of our pre-constructed adventure serial of the future, UNIVERSAL EAR, will receive its world (festival) premiere at IndieLisboa International Festival of Independent Cinema this May. The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum also played in a temporary cinema during Mr Cole's solo exhibition at Bandits-Mages in November. It marks the Institute's return to IndieLisboa ten years after It's Nick's Birthday received a Special Mention from the Jury at the 2009 edition - although a tight connection has been maintained between the festival and the Institute in the interim, through our presence on the prize jury in 2013 and attendance in support of colleague Aleksandra Niemczyk's work in 2016 and 2018. From wherever you're sat, it's a good festival.

Synopsis: Time-travelling record producer Harley Byrne crash-lands in a virtual reality heritage theme park in 22nd-century France. Corrupt holograms, cyborg saints, and sentient statues haunt an absurdist Super-8 universe, digitally re-colourized for your pleasure!

EVENT: UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum at IndieLisboa '19.
PROGRAM: International Shorts

WHERE: Culturgest - Pequeno Auditório, Edifício-sede da Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Rua Arco do Cego, 50, 1000–300 Lisbon

WHEN: Sunday 5th May, 2019, 21.45 & Wednesday 8th May, 2019, 17.00

COST: €4.50
NOTES: Writer/Director Graeme Cole will be in attendance for the Sunday screening (and potential intro/Q&A duty).

Epizoda ? is now online via tao films

The Institute's 2016 absurdist detective movie - Epizoda ? - is available to watch online for the first time, streaming on tao films, an art movie platform "which specialises in previously undistributed independent and arthouse cinema from around the world."

Watch Epizoda ? online.

Mentored by Béla Tarr, with original music by Dino Santaleza of Croatian band Pridjevi, and starring Vladimir Kajević and Elma Selman, it was the first movie to be directed by the Institute's Graeme Cole while he studied at Mr Tarr's film.factory in Sarajevo, BiH.

Synopsis: A TV detective who's lost the plot drives aimlessly around the city. Negotiating time and space seem achievable next to solving a murder in a factory, the only witness a robot with the ability to get under the skin with its only two programmed lines: “That interests me” and “What are you afraid of?”

Epizoda ? premiered at Rencontres Bandits-Mages in Bourges, France, in 2016 and went on to play at L'Alternativa (Barcelona) and the Auteur Film Festival in Belgrade among others. Most recently, it showed on a looping VHS cassette during Mr Cole's solo exhibition at the Slow Short Film Festival in Mayfield, UK.

The film is accompanied, on tao films, by an interview with the director. Epizoda ? can be 'rented' for €4.99 for 72 hours, or you can take out a month's subscription for just €1 more - which the Institute recommends, since our colleague Aleksandra Niemczyk will present two new films on the site this month, in addition to the copious hard-to-see art movies the service already hosts.

Launch of a temporally-limited edition book: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum

The Institute is proud to announce the launch of our first book.

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum was created by Graeme Cole with Aleksandra Niemczyk, in response to Mr Cole's EMAP/EMARE residency at Bandits-Mages in Bourges. It is available for just 21 days during this year's Rencontres Bandits-Mages, where this UNIVERSAL EAR episode will also appear in movie form as part of an installation until 2nd December.

Here's the science:

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum by Harley Byrne

229pp, paperback, 12/11-02/12/2018

Reconstructed by Graeme Cole (text) and Aleksandra Niemczyk (illustrations) from the unfound memoirs of Harley Byrne.

Available to buy in a temporally-limited edition during Rencontres Bandits-Mages 2018, 12th November-2nd December.

BUY NOW £8 +£5 postage and packaging (UK & international)

Harley Byrne’s ongoing mission is to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.” This novella-length extract from his memoirs tells the full story of Byrne’s adventures in Bourges, France, 2187AD.

While working on his escape from slavery in the reverb mines of 32nd-century Detroit, Byrne is tipped off to the existence of a form of ‘rogue sim electroacoustic pop’ created by a pair of sentient statues in 22nd-century Bourges.

But when he arrives in the historical city, he discovers it to be an ontologically dubious virtual heritage site, overrun with corrupt holograms, cyborg saints, and the occasional native telling fisherman’s tales from deep VR.

What’s more, one of the musicians is missing: the lab-cultured, organic statue of Saint Ursinus, recreated from ancient DNA but barely more than an adolescent.

In order to track him down, Byrne must navigate the ever re-loading maze of the city, outwit the crazed busts of Bourges’ most celebrated sons and daughters, and keep hold of his senses under the effects of the curse of the phantom tympanum.

Available for 21 days only, the first UNIVERSAL EAR book was created as part of an EMAP/EMARE artist residency at Bandits-Mages, Bourges, further supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. The book also contains a photographic project - A New Ontology of Hallucination - and Mr Cole’s studio log from the residency. A film adaptation of the adventure will loop as part of a Curse of the Phantom Tympanum exhibition at Le Haïdouc – Antre Peaux in Bourges from 16th November-2nd December 2018.

* Please note this is a small-scale, non-profit art project. We will endeavour to dispatch your book anywhere in the world within 5 days but please bear with us. Queries before and after purchase can be directed to graeme[at]zoomcitta dot co dot uk.

Slip Road exhibition: Epizoda ?, Amateri, and Murmurs in Mayfield

A one-day exhibition of three recent projects from Graeme Cole, all co-produced by the Institute, will take place as part of the second Slow Short Film Festival in Mayfield this Saturday. The videos will be shown on a loop in the Memorial Hall opposite the main venue. It is the first chance to see any of these movies in the UK, and includes a special preview version of the previously unseen, ASMR-themed Murmurs across two synchronized screens. Mr Cole will be in attendance at the festival. Aleskandra Niemczyk's Investigations Of A Dog, which Mr Cole highly recommends, will play in the main program. In fact, the whole day-long festival has been very thoughtfully prepared.

EVENT: Graeme Cole: Slip Road at The Slow Short Film Festival 2018

WHERE: Mayfield Memorial Hall, Tunbridge Wells Road, Mayfield, East Sussex TN20 6PJ.

WHEN: Saturday, 1st September 2018, 13.30-20.00

COST: Entrance to the exhibition is free. Tickets to the festival are £10 + fee.

NOTES: The three films will play concurrently: Epizoda ? (40 minutes), Amateri (20 minutes), and Murmurs (special preview version, 65 minutes). Facebook event.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 36

We spend the day in the house that Jacques built - the Palais Jacques Coeur, which France's richest man commissioned and had erected just in time for a brief tour before he was trialled and exiled. Well, the real thing doesn't have much colour these days, but Niemczyk and team's replica is bright and warm - it's only a shame it too will be drained by the black and white film stock. 

Still, it's a pleasure to shoot shot after shot against more or less the same background, with just small re-arrangements to place us further along a corridor, or more intensely menaced by quite-possibly-sentient statues (and stained glass window). By the end of the day, my brain is spinning and I struggle to string a sentence together - perhaps the underlying structure of the building, or the pattern of the wallpaper, is indeed cursed, with the curse to be replicated wherever those structures are re-composed.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 34

Worship the sun, and invoke the wrath of the rain. Well, that might be utter rubbish, but the project is certainly suffering from a severe case of hubris after yesterday's glowing successes, as today the crew arrives drenched by an 8.57am downpour. More seriously, this morning's guest actor slips on the way to the studio and, after a cup of sweet tea and the reassuring gazes of half-a-dozen medically incompetent filmmakers, returns home to rest it off: she will return tomorrow only if she's feeling much better.

But after that, the rain seems to have quenched its thirst for misery and misfortune, and instead becomes a pleasant background to our day's work, cocooning us in the studio and make the team feel a bit better about a day with the shutters mostly down.

Lockwood even begins to hibernate, after our first shot of the day - in which Harley Byrne is trapped in a tomb in the foetal position and believes himself on the brink of death - runs without a hitch. He's in a difficult place at the moment (emotionally rather than geographically - he's quite charmed by Bourges) and this moment seems important to him; we leave it as long as we can before removing him from his tomb so we can strike the set and set up the 'Bourges streets' scene. A respectful nod, for that first shot, should also be directed at intern Arthur Leray: on every shoot, there seems to be one person who gets roped into playing 'unidentifiable body parts' - yesterday he was a shoulder in a Manchester postal workers social club, and for today's opening shot a holographic saint's hand.

The 'Bourges street' shot takes up a serious wedge of the day which, as we reflect, could be considered somewhat daft, seeing as how the street itself is just around the corner but instead we've flown two artists and two actors across Europe to shoot it in shoddy cardboard replica in a studio five minute's walk away. But that's sort of the point, somehow. And Niemczyk's art and draughtspersonship, and ex-intern Yuan's legacy Palais Jacques Coeur replica, conjure a certain kind of magic in the studio when the whole wonky perspective shot is put into place.

Leray and soundie Queissner (who is stranded on set amidst mainly silent scenes today) team up to set-wrangle a simple close-up that just begged for a little complication. We add a row of houses, a moon, a reflector and some authentic Berry fog to the scene, and I only regret we didn't add any foliage. 

The city that Niemczyk built.

After that, it's back to trying to create a floor made of liquid hologram - or quicklight. It's an athletic feat, since working with a projector, a Super 8 camera with no monitor, and a hand-held vase-as-wonky-lens actually involves building up a sweat on this chilly Bourges afternoon. Lockwood, too, is pushed to his limits as he must replicate fighting for his life while sinking through a cross between quicksand, liquid light, and malevolent, dissolving floor tiles, no doubt dreaming of a warm, comfortable tomb in which to sleep once this trial is over.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 24

Aside from the loss of Yuan's talent and personality from the production team as she leaves us for the bright lights and shimmering pavements of the Sorbonne just before lunch, it means that our Intangibles unit - the team researching light and sound for the forthcoming shoot - is mostly male. We have Queissner, of course, but she's currently hunting ambiences off-site, leaving just Leray and myself to spend the day trying to improve our hologram set-up. 

The main issue is that the ideas that go into our shambolic form of mediation should be - however shambolic - not just derived from a couple of blokes; our vision of a future virtual reality interface and environment requires greater diversity of thought, feeling and representation (cf). However, Yuan lives on in the project through the ideas she provided in our early experiments (when it was just her and me), and through the cardboard cut-out we made at the time and are using as our stand-in dummy for holographic projection tests today. Indeed, she now exists twice on set, simultaneously as cardboard and as light. Perhaps big businesses that are trying to increase workplace diversity could take a leaf out of our book: with carefully placed mirrors and projections it's possible to multiply the female presence in the office.

Still, Aleksandra Niemczyk makes not infrequent visits to ours, the altar end of the Chapel, to variously provide better ideas/improve our existing ideas/articulate our developing ideas more quickly and succinctly than we boys are able. We spend some time trying to reconstruct the set-up we had the other day, which was around 60% as effective as what we're looking for, but even that proves difficult. 

Matters are complicated by the peculiar light politics of the studio, a combination of electro-shuttered windows, analogue barn doors, an enormous multiple automated light rig overhead that functions via a haunted control panel, and some traditional floor-bound fresnels and what-have-you; not to mention the projector and various laptop displays, iPhone screens and the occasional flash of a camera. Delphine Robin-Tyrek, project assistant by name (but we need to find a job title that more fully represents her enormous and varied contribution), whispers with the haunted control panel and with the Tangibles (the team building our sets and scenery, who thus also need light), and eventually we have a functioning democracy of light in which we are able to reliably create our hologram effect.

Top: cloudy tissues. Bottom: Mondial Tissus. Later: We all fall down.

The problem now is finding the right fabric to use as a screen, so as not to draw too much attention to the machinery of the hologram (although a little clunkiness is desirable) but to make it clear enough to show up on Super 8 next to the real (meaty) actors. We have a few scraps and shapes to try, including a mosquito net that acts like a kind of column of tulle. It seems to have the best level of transparency, but while it's great for human figures it's a bit too specific for the scene in which two holographic saints stand alongside a holographic tombstone. We decide instead to try to make a screen of the material, which means a trip to 'Mondial Tissus' with our resident fabrics expert Decerle, to invest almost as much in soft netting as we spent on the entire production of A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear. Still, as I assure the team, if we can get this effect right then we will probably be head-hunted as a unit to create Star Wars X.

Pride before fall.

Back to the Chapel, and I hang the curtains with Leray. We fire the whole thing up, and it looks kind of good, but too faint, somehow. Have I blown a Flea Orchestra sized wad of Euros (around twenty-five of them) on the wrong material? The size we got is also too awkward to start tripling it up (it's already folded over double) if we want it to fill the whole screen in a wide-shot. But anyway, frustrated, I walk over to give it a try. My foot gets tangled in the low-hanging cable of the projector and the stupid thing falls off its perch, instantly breaking.

Tripped by the light, my pride hurt, the clock ticking, we decide it's best to spend the last few minutes of the day 'clearing up'. What's most frustrating is that today was the day when I'd resolved to start being a bit neater about our experiments - to slow down and consider and also to be tidy and elegant. But I considered not the low-hanging cable.

In the evening, back at the house where Leray now rooms with us, the cable of another guest's computer is strung across from the kitchen counter to the work table. Leaving the kitchen, I manage to catch my foot on it and stumble, if no damage is done to the machine (thanks, for the millionth and first time, to Apple for their quick-release magnetic power sockets). I apologize to Leray, assuming it's his computer; he tells me it's not, and he had tripped on it himself only minutes previously. Filled with pride, I repair to my room: we may not have solved the hologram issue today, I may face hundreds of Euros worth of repair bills, but it is heartening to see our young apprentice learning from my clumsy example.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 23

The day begins with a human resources shuffle, Arthur Leray joining our 'Intangibles' just as Shengwen Yuan announces she must leave us, quite suddenly, for the Sorbonne. Well, of course Niemczyk and I can't take full credit for getting Yuan into the Sorbonne after just eight days on the UNIVERSAL EAR set, but as her roomie/adopted parents we can't help but feel proud - if we'll miss the young artist's bevelled perspective on life and art, and regret we won't get to know her further just yet!

Leray steps up to the projector with courage, and is kind enough to tolerate a whole morning of me trying to explain our ever disintegrating shot-list. His suggestions as to technical solutions for the 'quicklight' floor scene - in which the movie's hero, Harley Byrne, encounters a quicksand-like historical floor fabricated from goopy holographic light - lead us back to works of Karel Zeman, and we watch a 'wonder of Zeman'-type documentary over lunch with the Tangibles. It's an odd documentary, made creepy by the video transfer's melting music and laboured shots of the genius Zeman drawing for the children who make it all worthwhile. It seems like a propaganda movie, but for what, we don't know; it's inspiring all the same (as the best propaganda movies are) and we resolve to create our quicklight tiling with a bendy lens and a fancy duvet.

We have Yuan with us for one more afternoon, so we start to test some tricky shots together; a forced perspective street scene in which the cardboard architecture is supposed to appear with a lag, like the latency of VR or video game graphics. Even with our temporarily expanded team, we are short of hands, and while we are admirably equipped with tripods and stands none of them seem to match - nor to interface directly with cardboard. On Niemczyk's return from the shops, we arm ourselves with three different types of tape and just about figure out where the buildings should stand, and what materials we'll need to fill in the gaps.

The view through our Super 8 camera (Doris's successor - she still needs a name)

Further experiments abound: torture in 2D, more hologram stuff, and piecing together the modular background for Tympanum's Godotesque opening scene. The secret subtext of today's work is never far from the surface: we are preparing Yuan to enter the Sorbonne as a sort of mole and spreader of insidious propaganda for the L'Institute Zoom way.

Yuan adding finishing touches to her signature piece of scenery...

...and visiting it in an early video test.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 21

We lived the movie twice today. This morning, following a ‘show-and-tell’ of our respective photo tours of last week’s visit to the Palais Jacques Coeur - each photo set being almost identical since we walked the same route and were essentially on the look out for tympanums, cheeky sculptures and fancy colours - Yuan and I sat down with our new sound recordist Nina Quiessner in order to create a foley list by combing the script for sonic potential. Items such as ‘howling landscape of despair’, ‘awkward silence’ (“we should at least consider it”) and various thrums and thuds prove it a rich hunting ground.

In the afternoon, Niemczyk’s Tangibles squad take a break from rebuilding the city out of cardboard in order to step into the limelight, 'volunteering' to take starring roles as we video an entire script-reading of the movie. One of the key aims of this exercise is to physicalise the dead leaves of the screenplay to get its rather wordy thematic and visual potential out in the air (particularly important since the words are tough enough for a native English speaker to get their head around, let alone our Polish-French-Chinese-German crew).

The 'Curse' plot in a nutshell.

The women (for everyone in the studio except for me is one) have fresh-toasted printouts of the screenplay, while I work from the latest shotlist; the inconsistencies between the two soon lead us into chaos. We also run out of readers, or become confused as to whether we have enough people around to see the show through, since the story contains multiple cross-identities and layers of disguise and even physical properties (some characters are made of light, or metal, or flesh, or glass; at least one is history disguised as flesh disguised as stone).

The endeavour becomes not so much about carefully staging the shots so that I can cheat by pre-editing the finished movie, as about just getting through the dummy-shoot: we rush on to the end without even stopping the DV camera between shots; a cruel parody of next week’s proper shoot when we’ll likewise allow just one take per shot but will urgently stop the camera as soon as or even before each character finishes speaking, such is the premium on the Super 8 film stock through which we’ll be burning.

Afterwards, thankfully, the crew claim to have a better understanding of the potential movie. There’s nothing like a shared perilous experience to tune folks in to the precise frequency of their situation.

At our digs, where Niemczyk and I are currently holed up with Yuan and Bandits-Mages associates David Legrand and Julien Record and an artist called Pierre, a partial electrical outage has caused us to huddle together in the kitchen around a warm circle of Wi-Fi, when otherwise we might have kept to our rooms. With only wine and eco-detergent and brief flickers of Facebook to sustain this awkward pack of strays, who knows what frequencies we might tune into or into which layered personae we might lapse. If I don’t tweet by tomorrow noon, please send somebody to shoot this damned movie for us, since we will be lost.

The 'Curse' plot in a different nutshell.

UNIVERSAL EAR EMAN#EMARE residency enters Phase II

The second phase of Graeme Cole’s EMAN/EMARE artist residency with Aleksandra Niemczyk at Bandits-Mages will begin today.

The duo arrived in Bourges two weeks ago to begin preparations for a new episode of UNIVERSAL EAR, an unfound time-travel adventure serial of the future. The new episode is titled The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum, and takes place in a future Bourges in which the concrete present overlaps with 3D, holographic and augmented reality meta-levels populated by looping historical monuments wandering impossible virtual heritage spaces. 

Today, the team will take to the studio at ENSA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art Bourges) to begin a period of intensive construction and experimentation ahead of the shoot, which is intended to take place during the final week of September. An artist’s book and supporting videos and digital materials will also be produced, with the work intended to be exhibited in 2018. 

The project can be followed on Mr Cole’s blog, Twitter, by joining the UNIVERSAL EAR Facebook Group, and on the official UNIVERSAL EAR website (Tumblr). 

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Image credit: Elly Strigner

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 2

Day 2: mostly about creating that second ear (see: Day 1).

We seemed to find our rhythm today. Following yesterday's atrocious camerawork, I switched to the sound recorder to gather street ambiences along the left 'ear' - the western half of the sinister circle that’s printed on local maps of Bourges. I think I’m more comfortable framing sounds. Meanwhile, Niemczyk took a freer, more expressive approach to filming those areas where the circle corresponds to a place that can be accessed by the public. 

We took more stills today, which should make the finished document a little richer for the casual viewer. We joke that we are making the world's most pretentious holiday movie, but deep down we know we're doing work whose tremendous importance will only be recognized several generations along the line.

Of course, I forgot to delete yesterday's sound file so the recorder cut out 48 minutes into today's walk. We continued recording sounds moments later with Niemczyk's iPhone; my left ear, then, will have a little sonic nick cut out of it, and a flat top.

Curiously, today’s prescribed semi-circuit happened to take us past the cinema where my movie Epizoda ? played last November, and also past the Rue Mausecret, giving us the exact view that I saw on Google Maps and which you probably remember me Tweeting about, six months ago almost to the day. As the (indispensible) Encyclopedie de Bourges tells us, via Google Translate:

‘It is a very old neighborhood, which included both the Jewish neighborhood with the presence of the synagogue, and undoubtedly the neighborhood of mysterious or dubious practices constituted by sorcery, black magic or alchemy. Thus, we find the street name "Montsecret" as early as 1541, which will see the spelling of his name changing. For some local scholars, two versions of this street can be brought, namely "my secret", that is to say a street that contains unknown elements, or "mau secret" that can be translated as "bad" And then we touch black magic.’

This seems like a very good sign.

Window display on city cafe. (Photo credit: Aleksandra Niemczyk)

 The first of the real-life characters from the montage who we have been able to locate. (Photo credit: Aleksandra Niemczyk)

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 1

I am currently without a digital camera, so this entry has been illustrated with stock photographs.

We are building a team, here in Bourges, for our project: to (p)reconstruct a lost episode of an unfound time-travel adventure serial of the future -

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum

- and to carry out various other tests, experiments and disciplines. The episode itself is set in a future Bourges where (following the over-zealous efforts of a corrupt heritage minister) wise-cracking holographic statues and ontologically dubious virtual heritage sites have more or less ousted any form contemporary human life (or ‘live heritage objects’ as we might become known).

We are putting together a team, but for now it’s just Aleksandra Niemczyk - my partner in love and art – and myself ‘in the field’, with support from the Bandits-Mages team back at base. Our crew arrives at the beginning of September; Lockwood and Betts will of course rejoin us in their roles as heroic Harley Byrne and his nemesis, Being, mysterious mistress of disguise.

In the meantime, we’re working on finding a better job description for Niemczyk’s role in this project in relation to mine, aside from her role as production designer: co-pilot? augmenteer? vasulker? I had some idea that the ideal term might be found somewhere in the nomenclature behind ‘three-strip’ film; the idea that we’re each exposing different prime colours of the finished thing. But there’s no word there that would look cool enough on a business card.

Today, we attempted a sort of dérive soumise (does that just about translate as ‘submissive drift’?). Rather than the follow the traditional counter-spectacle spirit of the dérive we embraced city planning and the heritage industry by beginning to follow, as closely as possible, the route of a sinister circle that appears on the city map to demarcate everything that is within an 8-minute walk of the famous cathedral. A circle which, even if its position was quite deliberately chosen for reasons shadier than tourist convenience or to make particular emphases, must still contain some element of randomness, some unexpected ambiences (ambience is a key element of Phantom Tympanum). We hoped, in other words, to grab a slice of the city’s sound life while illuminating some conspiracy that would tear apart city hall and the Alchemists Guild.

The Cathedral of St Etienne of Bourges. (Actual
Cathedral of St Etienne of Bourges not shown).

Niemczyk taped the sound as we went and, if our footsteps give us away on the recording, we were quite disciplined in remaining wordless. Occasional bursts of my Super 8 camera motor when we reached points that were touched by the circle will both augment the ambience and help us to align the film material with the sound material when the former is eventually processed.

Unfortunately, my British foolhardiness led us out on this scientific expedition at the height of the day’s heat and, when we abandoned the project at the exact halfway point, we found ourselves dehydrated and without water in a town whose high streets suddenly seemed devoid of any tabac or even so much as a Tesco Express.

Casting our principles to the wind, we cut back straight through the city, cross-sectioning our sacred circle, past the cathedral, our will fading. The historic stone dissolved like a hallucination or an unconvincing virtual reality transition, into endless sand dunes peppered with melting monuments: we were to die in the desert.

Thankfully we were two, and our mutual encouragement (even when Niemczyk slowed to photograph an abandoned shop or stencilled graffito that briefly rematerialized) saw us reach the south-west of the city and the familiar sight of Le Panier D'Auron grocers where you can always get a litre of water and a plastic-wrapped croissant. Logically, our plight cannot have lasted for longer than 16 minutes, but time is subjective when all you see around you are shimmering mirages of the re-animated, location-specific historical moments you’ve been reimagining in front of a laptop for the past six months.

Tomorrow we will attempt to complete the other half of the circle. Seeing as Niemczyk was on sound duty today, I’ll take it tomorrow – giving us, in effect, one semi-circular ear each on the city. Is there a job title for Niemczyk somewhere in that image?