UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 10

After a fairly nondescript couple of days (hence they have not been described in these pages) of hammering away at the script and malingering around our Bourges digs recovering from Monday night's accident, Thursday begins with a little light leg treatment before we join Robin-Tyrek in the Bandits-Mages van for a trip to the shops.

Niemczyk changes my dressing.

We try to upcycle and recycle as much as possible at Universal Ear Studios, partly out of the belief that it makes little sense to ransack the planet in the name of modulating the soul, but mostly out of adherence to the quasi-mythical cineaste and TVaste Francis Dove's aesthetic school of 'clunkyism'. Of course, we need some things to stick these old bits of junk (and cardboard) together, so we start at Brico Dépôt for masking tape and paint brushes. On the way out, we are shocked to see La Dépôt stocks a range of doors that are both named and styled after the fourteen members of arch-villain Being's girl gang in one of the many unfound UNIVERSAL EAR spin-off series. It's surely a work we should look at in closer detail in the near future.

Who would you cast in each of these roles?

Honing Robin-Tyrek's cardboard-sensing capabilities.

Outside, however, the sky mocks our efforts with row upon row of perfect cartoon clouds and a pink castle that's clearly been made with the cardboard from a giant toilet roll. It is surely time for a classic French 2-hour dejeuner.

We lunch on gourmet fast-food burgers and dreadful coffee amongst the concrete gardens of Bourge's inhuman industrial suburb (which we should actually make a point of boycotting since it's killing the city). Robin-Tyrek fills in some gaps in my knowledge of the local history, particularly the subcategories of fire and pastry, and suggests that the 'ass' of the cathedral that was pointed out to us the other day is just one of many profane flourishes to be found around the building, reasoning that the cathedral took so long to build that the workers just got bored and started freestyling. Now that's what I call heritage!

Next we make the journey to an Emmaüs du Cher outlet packed with dusty, half-broken, once-beautiful things-de-house, from tasteless oversized and completely desirable furnitures to stinking books and haunted ornaments. The counter-intuitive, hand-crafted, and in many cases vernacular nature of these objects is a testament in miniature to a time before the helicopters came to drop Brico Dépôt-sized architectural onesies packed with affordable, car boot-friendly goods across the west's under-exploited sub-suburbs. As we prepare to leap into a project that can't help but highlight the absurdity of the things we label and treat as heritage objects and locations, it sort of makes one want to scrape the filth off those wretched, beautiful former possessions of wretched, beautiful former people and reanimate the DNA in a corrugated-iron warehouse theme park of the bad taste and good times of the city's countless golden ages.

I can't wait for this band to come on.

Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They’re Real

An entry in the Glossary project

Francis Dove’s notorious 60,000 word tutorial on character development in film and television productions was serialised over eight issues of the screen industry journal SquareEyes against the will of its then editor, who handed in his resignation when the legal department insisted that a hidden clause in Dove’s contract compelled them to publish anything Dove submitted for print. With no-one else willing to take on the editorship under such conditions, the journal fell under the unofficial control of Dove himself, becoming a textual ghetto for his increasingly unpalatable ideas on film, life and the hybridization of the two.

Only the abstract survives:

Everybody knows that in fiction, if you want to create a deep character all you have to do is create a very consistent character who does something surprising at the end of the second act. In life, of course, we know that when someone does something unpredictable it us usually due to a partly formed or poorly defined personality, or that they are always doing unpredictable things to try and hide a self-perceived shallowness. To really say that someone is more or less deep is an over-neat metaphor for the human condition: we are, more accurately, all equally shallow (though some taller than others), but with different (and fluctuating) levels of turbulence, pressure and indigenous life. However, these are not our concerns here: if you want to create a deep character all you have to do is create a very consistent character who does something surprising at the end of the second act. How have the artisans of film and television worked, and may they continue to rework, this formula again and again and again to give the illusion of real actual inner life?

Somebody, at least, was reading: Volodymyr Nanneman made substantial changes to the character-generating function of his electronic filmmaking kit, apparently alarmed by the misanthropy he saw in Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They’re Real. Dove, however, insisted his paper was a gesture of deep affection towards his colleagues, rivals and humankind in general.

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

Destructural Sound

An entry in the Glossary project

Perhaps inspired by the way a flying trapezist orients himself in the 3-dimensional space of the big top using the balancing mechanisms of his semi-circular canals, it was Nanneman’s belief that movie audiences could be guided through the hidden substructures of a movie by their ears, although in this case through the use of structural sound mapping* rather than endolymphatic stimulation. With every last component of a Redestructivish film chosen from the finite (if massive) selection listed in the Catalogue, it was possible to assign each component (be it a character, a costume, a feeling or whatever) a more or less noticeable sound identity quite aside from any specific functional sound it might be associated with on a narrative level. Thus, an audience member should be able to position himself in relation to a Redestructivish movie’s invisible moral or sartorial or emotional framework at any point during a screening, by triangulating the sound identities of each activated component. It was Nanneman’s claim that, much like the trapezist (or man on the street) whose sense of balance is essentially an automatic process (with conscious attention demanded by the tricky bits), the audience would rarely have to work at recognising these sonically-highlighted substructures, although Hanni suggested that was a slightly optimistic view of how the human mind works.

Nanneman coined the term ‘Destructural Sound’ to refer to a recurring technical fault within this system whereby sounds intended to be ‘structural’ would leak between the materials of a film’s architecture, warping or even demolishing that movie’s substructures even as it unfolded.

For the most part, when this inexplicable glitch occurred, sound identities would jump between components, even between those components that did not feature together in the same scenes; some would become completely detached from their intended components and float freely through a movie without becoming attached to other components; still other sound identities would spontaneously begin to mimic adjacent components creating meshes of unintended meaning, exposing oversimplified versions of unintended undercurrents to anyone who was listening carefully. Hanni reassured Nanneman that such audience members would be few and far between, and that to the casual viewer of these early test movies the Destructural Sound - if noticed at all - would probably be attributed to faulty speakers. Still, Nanneman could only hear these distortions as structural damage and, when a remedy was not forthcoming, he instead opted to recast the defect in a positive light.

Nanneman’s suggestion that a filmmaker using the Catalogue to create a Redestructivish movie might "encourage" the phenomenon of Destructural Sound merely by the (non)-act of not correcting it when it occurred might seem disingenuous. Rather than taking the blame, wasn’t Nanneman attempting to take credit, as conceiver and craftsman, for what was essentially a major fault in the Redestructivish system? Was not his capitalisation of the very term Destructural Sound the equivalent of a car manufacturer trademarking the phrase "break down"?

In fact, the period that Nanneman spent developing sounds and sound systems for the Catalogue was, for him, a deeply troubling time, in which he lost faith in himself as a facilitator and an engineer. He had designed himself into a corner, considered himself professionally stranded and, despite his stated goal of facilitating films that would reassure the nation’s unsettled populace, he perhaps saw in the phenomenon of Destructural Sound an apt and personally comforting structural/aesthetic analogy for his own condition - and by extension a valid artistic mechanism. An audience member trying too hard to navigate the hidden substructures of a Redestructivish movie could now become literally ‘lost’ in it.

Of course, Nanneman eventually worked his way through his sound issues, variously fixing or explaining away or forgetting about the Catalogue’s audio shortcomings, the plain passing of time allowing him to look back on that period as what he might characteristically have called a "forest/trees" situation. All the same, once in the clear Nanneman never returned to confront the "forest" of sound in which he had become so lost: the flaws and their euphemistic labels remained integral to the Redestructivish package. The turmoil that Destructural Sound would have made on the cinema sound system repairs industry had the Catalogue ever progressed beyond the test stage can only be imagined.

*(not to be confused with geographic sound mapping in the films of Francis Dove, whose ever diminishing budgets saw an increasing reliance on sets built from light, fog and upturned boxes and who therefore oriented audiences in his characters’ surroundings through the use of consistent and aggressive soundscaping)

See also: Foley Bleed

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

Shapes

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman’s Catalogue removed the trial of working with actors from the filmmaking process by creating the possibility of generating endless, digitally powered variations on just two pre-recorded performances (those of he and his second wife, Hanni). For a journeyman director like Francis Dove, forced to continue working with real actors and often with little say in the casting process, Nanneman’s reductive approach was understandably appealing:

"Could we postulate that, for those of us who cannot or will not utilise Nanneman's toolkit, there remain two possible approaches to putting an actor on the screen?" asked Dove, in his trade journal column. "The first is ‘acting for the screen’, in which the actor is the screen’s "goon", that is to say they act for and in total deference to the screen. The second, more tiresome method is ‘a screen for the actor’, in which the screen becomes a canvas over which the actor may freely ejaculate his or her deepest needs and instincts safe in the knowledge that none will be wasted, all will be caught and exhibited via the familiar media.

"In the instance of acting for the screen, only a contorted sense of human biophysics is directly referenced: the screen is a two dimensional light show rather than a stage play, and instructions or ‘shapes’ (fine-tuned and categorised through hundreds of hours of laboratory work) are imparted to the actor to carry out without question. (It is a given that such direction is most effective when conveyed with a firmness that borders on cruelty).

"By acknowledging the volition of the players, the screen for the actor method allows a complex but aesthetically arbitrary, exploration of idiocy (the fundamental subject matter of any human-oriented drama). Each actor becomes yet another inlet in the convoluted plumbing of an idea from inspiration to finished screen efflux.

"Thus before embarking on a new project, I always ask myself: can I afford to gamble on the idiocy of my cast? If they unexpectedly turn out perceptive actor-oriented performances of grace and dignity, will I have the resources to fix (break) them? If the answer is No, I get out my big book of shapes.

"Finally, it might be divulged here that actor and screen are both absolutely the goons of sound: this is one of the great secrets of cinema, and sound likes it that way."

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

Voiceover

An entry in the Glossary project

Ever-cautious about confusing issues of authorship and ownership, Nanneman did not provide a facility for voiceovers within his movie-making kit, claiming that "audiences are wont to recognise the perpetrator of a movie voiceover as the owner of the images and their subsidiary ideas and emotions regardless of the fact that the voice belongs to a fictional character with limited proprietary rights." However, it did not take long for his city council colleagues to find a 'cheat': a specific combination of one of the shyest character types placed into a busy set (where they would inevitably recede behind other visual matter) and pumped full of third-person dialogue. It appeared, when this cheat was being used, that a voiceover was being read by some unseen, all-seeing character when in fact this effect was achieved by specifically generating a self-effacing character with a high intuition level-setting. A cruder version of this cheat, known as a "feelings voiceover", involved partially-hidden characters screaming, grunting or verbalising emotions in sympathy with the surrounding images: Nanneman was not impressed, pointing out that there were plenty of pure feelings to choose from within the Catalogue without having to resort to ambiguous vocal effects.

Unusually, Nanneman was in agreement with Francis Dove concerning the rejection of voiceover, albeit for different reasons. In his (apparently ad lib) narration of an educational video on the history of film, an increasingly distressed-sounding Dove offers the theory that voiceover is first experienced as the third-person narration of one’s own development i.e. as a baby listening to one's parents; that this early exposure to voiceover is an over-clinical yet disorienting affair following the abstract aural experience of womb life; and that indeed, should we choose to go back that far, it all goes downhill after one's respective gametes are rocked by the soundwaves of pleasure or relief that accompany the procreative act. Three-fifths of the way through the same educational video, just after describing Harley Byrne’s notorious documentary Girls of Unfortunate Climes*, Dove declares the voiceover "dead", himself remaining silent for the rest of the programme apart from the occasional faint chewing sound.

Aside from his pathological distrust of certainty - which he identified as a recurrent yet undesirable characteristic of the movie voiceover - Dove had several recent examples of the voiceover-in-breakdown to inspire this moratorium. In Harris Metcalf's Clockwork Film it quickly becomes clear from the way they move that the supporting characters, as the result of a technical fault, can hear the hero's voiceover, though not make out the words he's saying - only cadence and timbre. Their actions become an involuntary dance to an obscure song whose near synchronization with the unfolding events (which the voiceover of course describes) occurs to them as a déjà vu. Metcalf attempted to improve on his "mechanically-generated" filmmaking technique with Clockwork II, but this time the hero - who is retrospectively narrating the images in which he appears - runs out of things to say mid-way through. The on-screen action slows to a halt and, to fill the time, our screen-hero himself starts to dance, accompanied intermittently by the rather amateurish beat-boxing attempts of his narrator alter-ego. After a while, the screen-hero runs out of moves and sits down for the rest of the movie, while the other characters develop a subplot.

Witness also Nola Luna IV's Takashi From End To End, the unauthorised feature-length biopic of her eponymous ex-boyfriend, in which Luna herself provides the "narration": the off-screen parroting of Takashi's every spoken line with sounds like "muh" and "mur" pronounced in what is undoubtedly neither her own natural voice nor a strictly accurate impersonation of Takashi himself.

*(in which Byrne's authoritative narration, rewriting events in his own voice, was committed to tape in apparent denial of the trauma of having been imprisoned and tortured by the feral teens he was documenting; a digital stutter on surviving copies seems, however, to express through technical fault that which Byrne was unwilling or unable to acknowledge in the text.)

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

Screams

An entry in the Glossary project

As a former trapezist who had swung and dangled voicelessly over the abyss night after night and year after year to the gasps and cheers of audiences, Nanneman really had no idea what a scream was for, or even whether anyone actually did scream outside of the movies. Understanding, however, that the "woman's scream" was an essential part of the filmmaker's toolbox, he set Hanni the task of compiling a library of "one or two dozen" recorded screams in a variety of styles and meanings to be used by the Catalogue's computer-generated characters in appropriate situations.

It seems that Hanni already had a source in mind for the recordings: Serafina Kustra, a "scream musician" of sorts, a folk hero in a binary age whose live performances people would travel from far away to witness. Kustra had previously achieved mild fame fronting a band whose entire repertoire had consisted of songs built around repetition of the band's name and lyrics extolling the group's merits in very general terms: perhaps her messianic appeal as a solo artist can be attributed to the simplification and emotional inversion of this approach. Hanni, idolizing Kustra for reasons she never publicly articulated, offered the vocalist a not inconsiderable sum from the Catalogue project's unofficial city council fund, rationalising the gesture to Nanneman by suggesting he himself could provide the male screams at a cut rate. It is unclear why Nanneman failed to nip this plan in the bud given the expense and his desire to distance himself from the scream-cataloguing process, but perhaps he sensed that the issue was important to Hanni.

(Nanneman was not the only filmmaker of the time to be squeamish about vociferation. Jobbing director Francis Dove, who would generally work with scripts imposed on him by producers, kept a list of alternative non-linguistic utterances with which to replace a scripted scream on set. Dove acknowledged that a written scream is usually structurally important, with its removal potentially undermining a moment of climax or catharsis. However, he discovered that the straight replacement of such a scream with (for example) a laugh, a sigh, a raspberry or snort, would enable him to maintain the structure of the written scene while destabilizing its underlying assumptions. If, having filmed such a substitution, he found that a scene no longer worked, it was not uncommon for Dove to edit the vociferation and even the actress out of the entire scene, leaving murderers stabbing at thin air, rabid beasts howling at dumb walls and in one case the spontaneous materialisation of a pink, wet newborn on the back seat of a moving taxi.)

In the event, Serafina Kustra turned down the job of providing the Catalogue's screams, refuting in no uncertain terms the idea that her vocal style had anything to do with screaming, and taking deep offence at the suggestion that a selection of her most intimate and heartfelt vocal performances might be defined, categorized and donated to computer-generated movie characters. Respecting this position, Hanni instead recorded and labelled 144 wildly varying screams of her own, and finally cajoled Nanneman into providing one single scream for men, although it was recommended in the small print that the latter never be used.

See also: Whoops; Yells

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

New Deal For Audiences, A

An entry in the Glossary project

Mentioned in the Catalogue only in passing, Francis Dove’s A New Deal For Audiences manifesto was written in response to his ongoing inability to break out of TV and into cinema: every time he was offered a shot at fully expressing his vision with a feature-length, the dismal commercial and critical response would force him back to another decade or more of frustration and barely-noticed small screen subversion.

Dove printed thousands of copies of his manifesto (rather than the millions or billions it would surely take to make the necessary adjustments to the world’s movie audience) and took the fight to the front line, intending to picket Friday night screenings of contemporary box office hits but retiring mid-way through the trailers on his first night, quoted as complaining that "the problem with audiences is, they’re just people."

"A New Deal For Audiences

Hello. You can call me Frank. Even my mother doesn’t call me Frank. But my wife does. I am the one who makes the films. You are the one who watches them. I thought we might come to an agreement:

1. Just bear with me on this.

2. You are the centre of the universe.

3. That doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t free you of responsibility.

4. You won’t have to interact. You won’t even have to stand anywhere that you’ll feel self-conscious. But you will have to think now and then, to the extent of questioning what you know and unlearning how you watch.

5. Don’t be threatened by the unusual. I’m not doing it to hurt you or make you feel stupid, though I can’t speak for my colleagues.

6. Include the environmental factors of your screening situation (sounds, objects, light, seating, smell and people) as fully part of the film you’re watching. Accept that I put them all there on purpose.

7. The best filmmaker makes a film that requires no prior knowledge of its own or any other terms.

8. The best audience accepts a movie on that movie’s terms, whether it conforms to the previous statement or not, learning those terms if necessary whilst watching them and afterwards on the bus.

9. Some of my colleagues are responsible for making academic films. Their collective filmographies represent a conversation between academics. Others stick to a basic grammar that by itself stultifies the content and furthermore, in extension of this laziness, tend to pile the grammar clumsily on top of itself until it comes crashing down on you. They still get their point across. A third sect play it vernacular. Some of these are the academics in disguise, some are still lazier grammarians and the worthwhile ones you’ll have to search energetically to find. And even then it’s a risk if you’re on a date.

10. My duty remains, however personal, cerebral or experimental a film should be, to make you at the very least go "Yeah!" and ideally to make you want to hug yourself and those around you. The nature of the hug may vary from film to film and you will have to police the situation yourself.

11. About toilet breaks: I can’t stop you. Why not try taking the characters in with you?

12. Story is essential to the human animal, but the idea of what story is has been monopolised by our oppressors. Don’t feel you have to look for "A Story" - just be ready to absorb "some story". If you need your hits delivered at pre-defined intervals, get yourself a drugs problem.

13. About realism: the visible world is all around you. The cinema is about illuminating the invisible. You trust and worship the realists because, in photographing the natural world, approximating its everyday occurrences and hiding the artifice, they appear to be honest and serious. It takes no effort to go along with because it looks just like the outside. It is a greater and more rewarding leap of faith to give oneself up to ostentatious artificiality. Artificialists use the language of lies to search for coded truths. Your nightmares are the only important issue. Come on - you’re sophisticated enough now to at least play along with us. And laugh the earnest cavemen out of the cinema.

14. If you’re scared of looking silly in front of your friends, then you’re scared of life - and that may be because you have the wrong friends. Take it from someone who’s scared of life.

15. Really, if you’re not going to try, you may as well have a nap. It’s cheaper for you and saves me having to see that look on your face.

16. This isn’t an argument I’m trying to win. It is an understanding I am trying to reach.

Thanks for reading.

Yours faithfully,

Francis Dove. (Frank)."

This was just the first of several such manifestos of greater or lesser, mostly lesser, effect.

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

Dove, Francis

An entry in the Glossary project

When, on the advice of his soon-to-be collaborator Harley Byrne, the TV director Francis Dove had his wife permanently committed to an amnesiacs’ hospice, it was Dove who was left with the memories. In his attempts to monumentalise them, he chipped, sanded and warped these memories into the clunky, quite explicitly falsified stage sets of his own personal history; watched helplessly as the scenes that he replayed again and again in his mind became smooth-edged mythologies, lore without nuance.

Dove’s work began to take on the same clunky, mechanical nature: in over-defining the respective elements of his screen works, he was being sarcastic about certainty. This approach found an appropriate outlet in his cinematic serialisation of Byrne’s music-hunting memoirs, UNIVERSAL EAR. As with the compression and digital archiving of music, Dove sought to reduce, simplify and vacuum-pack the various physical and sonic aspects that the EAR scripts detailed. Yet these elements, although coldly configured in mutual isolation, were selected for their tactile, flawed, organic nature. It is this disparity between the cleanness of their juxtaposition and the imperfection of their individual states that Dove used to humanise the scientific, to devalue the authority of human logic and to dismiss - or ridicule - any definitive reading of the text.

Dove stated that his simplified caricatures of Byrne’s real-life experiences were the most complete picture that it was ethical to provide, however far that may have wandered from any ideal of naturalism: that the real movie did not occur on the screen, but in the eyes, ears and brains of the audience, where it would crystallize as a new memory before crumbling away into the recesses of the mind.

See also: Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They're Real

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

Implicit, The

An entry in the Glossary project

In its redestructivish sense, the Implicit is the inverse of Visual Matter or, to put it another way, the essence that fills the holes in the mise-en-scene.

Nanneman stated that although the Implicit was intangible and existed only as an unambiguous natural force that would come into being between any two or more of his components once activated, there would still be a small fee applicable for its use. Hanni took to referring to this fee as a "subtext tax", although Nanneman discouraged her use of this term as it just confused things. The Implicit was an aesthetic side-effect which, whilst unavoidable, could hardly be considered vital to any movie, while the subtext was an essential structural tool which Nanneman suggested had been, since the birth of cinema, "screenwriting’s dark little secret".

For Francis Dove, Nanneman's idea of the Implicit was too weighted and specific. The gaps between screen presences were "less, even, than essence". While visual matter could be used to contextualise (not define) the nothingness that it framed, that was not the same as making this nothingness something itself. From this perspective, Dove's use of ostentatiously artificial sets, props and performances as a moving architecture of absence can be considered an acknowledgement of the futility of artistic pursuit against the dumb mystery of the universe. His contemporaries alternately labelled Dove’s work as "clunkyist" or "nothingist" depending on the part of the screen to which they were referring: he might more accurately have been described as a nothingist wrapped up in a clunkyist (as a filmmaker) or vice versa (in his day-to-day life).

Dove’s creative partner Harley Byrne, who had enormous respect for Nanneman as a thinker (but not as a man), countered that "just because the unknowable isn’t defined, doesn’t mean we’re unsure what it is," though it is possible that Dove wasn’t listening.

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

On Universal Ear

Update, January 2013: our official UNIVERSAL EAR website is now the definitive resource for all things Harley Byrne. What follows here is the original blog announcing the project, including the most complete back-story of pre-UNIVERSAL EAR Byrne that we are aware of:

Whilst walking the grounds of Zoomcitta this afternoon I dropped in on the workshop of our Future Films department, the office dedicated to using our infamous modified 2-D Quantum Propaganda Engine to dredge up cinematic artefacts that have not yet been created and ‘redestroy’ them for education and profit. How better to learn from our mistakes – society and filmmakers alike – than to watch them in 256 gaudy colours before they’ve even been made?

It is common knowledge that the modified Engine produces less useful results the further ahead it is aimed and, as a result, the Institute has concentrated on short-term futures, specifically from the year 2012. There is not room here to document the full extent of the department’s cinematic discoveries to date, but one particular curiosity was brought to my attention as I sipped tea with the Future Films crew: an epic serial under the cumbersome title -

“(Being An Adaptation In Serial Form Of Harley Byrne’s Memoirs Concerning His Brave Exploits In The Service Of Capturing All The World’s Music Ever For His Employers At The) Universal Ear (Digicorp, And Starring Mr Byrne Himself In The Role Of Harley Byrne, Himself)”

– or UNIVERSAL EAR, for short.

It seems that Harley Byrne is a real-life figure in 2012 Manchester and, given his celebrity, Future Films have been able to sketch out a certain amount of biographical information about him – which, as you will see, is indivisible from the dramatized memoirs that form the serial.

Earnest, confident, self-effacing but fundamentally smug, Byrne joined the postal service straight from school in order to see Manchester and avoid the university system, working his way up from the sorting office, to letter delivery, to parcels, where he preferred to stay rather than seek promotion to the offices ‘upstairs’. However, in the Christmas rush of 2011 he was attacked by an overzealous guard dog whilst delivering a DVD box set in Ladybarn and, although he managed to beat the dog to death against a gatepost, he lost a finger – and was taken off the streets. A career in routes management beckoned until the postal service won a contract to make information films for the government, as they had done half a century before. Byrne was doubtful about becoming a filmmaker but his only alternatives were clerical work or forced retirement on double pay. He quickly convinced himself that documentary filmmakers were the gentleman explorers of the twenty-first century and set about designing a holistic one-man filmmaking machine – a contraption to record and re-interpret the spirit of a given subject rather than to reproduce light on film or pixels. His intention was to “document” what was in front of him, rather than copy it by simply photographing the light it reflects (such an approach would, to Byrne, have seemed fraudulent and to ignore the deeper truths that two decades of pounding the asphalt had brought to his awareness).

Byrne’s documentarian adventure was short-lived. On his maiden project, the notorious Girls of Unfortunate Climes (aka Icy Video@Abel’s Vagina), the filmmaker was taken captive by the indigenous teenagers he sought to study and – before his subjects were all killed in a freak weather incident – had his spirit-capturing filmmaking machine integrated intimately into his digestive system. By the time he had the strength to check himself out of rehab, his job had been taken by media studies graduates.

Byrne was not to be kept down. A chance meeting with the surgeon who had led the recovery team was to prove fruitful when the cutter, having been impressed with the craftsmanship of Byrne’s errant filmmaking contraption, happened to mention that his wife held a lofty office in the Universal Ear Digicorp. The digital music conglomerate was in trouble: having made a point of boasting their intention to make “all the world’s music, ever” available, they were now the target of a class action by misled consumers. Universal Ear had to appear to be attempting to fulfil their intention, however unfeasible its attainment.

From Universal Ear’s perspective, employing Harley Byrne was a purely token gesture. But once the contracts were signed, Byrne set his mind on the impossible problem of making available for download “all the world’s music, ever”. By cleaning and recalibrating his spirit-capturing movie camera, he was able to use it instead to digitally record the most obscure forms of musical expression - as long as he was in the right place, at the right time, and the right conditions were achieved. Geography and the elements were no barrier to a man who’d spent his best years on the postal routes of Manchester. The precise conditions for recording each stray track would have to be discovered and evoked on a mission-by-mission basis. This left, however, the brief’s unavoidable temporal factor to be resolved.

When all other solutions proved inadequate, Byrne overcame his pride and tracked down the brother he had disowned many years back. Santiago Byrne, a “cripple” of below average male strength, had been raised in the protection of his brother Harley and the two had nurtured a rare and proud fraternal love. Unguarded once his brother went into the postal service, Santiago had fallen into artistic circles and began to drink regularly, undermining the fitness regime that Harley had taken pains to set out for him and refusing to see the error of his ways when Harley found out. The situation had simmered for several months until Santiago deliberately provoked Harley into violence with his degenerate opinions on postage stamp design. Hospitalised and unrepentant, Santiago revealed his ulterior motive had been to have his brother render him unfit for even the white collar work a man of his puny stature was surely destined. Used and betrayed, Harley did not speak to his brother for nearly two decades until he was forced to admit he needed the help of Santiago and the techno-artistic coterie with whom he was associated: the so-called temporal cubists, whose reconceived representations of time, whilst dangerous enough to cause massive controversy and force the group underground, were in effect a potential path into the fourth dimension. If the temporal cubists were unapologetic recartographers of time, Harley Byrne was the one man brave – or foolish – enough to tread the routes they imagined.

The serial itself tells the story of much of what followed, and came about as a result of Byrne’s reluctant ascent to celebrity as his successful expeditions took him thousands of miles and sometimes millions of years around humankind’s – often hitherto unheard of – cultural history, frequently having to adjust his narrow 2012 definitions of “world”, “music” and “ever” and thus constantly extending the task ahead of him. Whilst contemporary time must have seemed to move slowly as Harley returned from each trip to the torpor of 2012 Manchester, for Santiago it was a period of constant activity as he exploited the moral ambiguities of his brother’s imperialist mission, using Harley’s name to draw ever more attention to the work of the temporal cubists. Reluctantly, Harley in turn began to write his own account of his exploits in order to prevent Santiago mythologizing them beyond recognition.

The TV director Francis Dove happened upon an article that Santiago wrote detailing the Girls Of Unfortunate Climes fiasco, found the whole tale hilarious and approached Harley to propose a pilot episode for a potential serialisation of his music hunting memoirs. Byrne instantly refused, telling Dove that “in life, you don't get a pilot episode”. In fact, Byrne must have been worried about the mischievous glint in Dove’s eye: anything less than a completely serious chronicling of his adventures would fail to do justice to Byrne’s character. But shortly after his initial approach to Byrne, Dove’s wife contracted a rare strain of avian flu, a condition which caused extensive brain damage and severe amnesia, such that she could only ever remember a five-minute period precisely 4½ years before any given point. Possibly on Byrne's advice, and with a great deal of heartache, Dove had her permanently committed to an amnesiacs hospice in Northumbria. Finally, he had the sense of gravity needed to take on the Universal Ear project, and production began with Byrne playing himself as the roving huntsman of sound, forever frustrated by his own shifting concept of what does and what doesn’t count as Music.

It has been said that over 1,000 episodes were made, though Byrne was only directly involved in the making of 70-80% of them. Byrne and Dove argued over the use of synthesized sounds where original music files had become corrupted, Byrne arguing that the missing music “belongs lost… playing to itself eternally in nothingness” and that synthetic versions would constitute new music which would, of course, need to be added to Universal Ear’s collection – creating a conflict of interests and potential audio-ethical paradox. In order to keep his memoirs pure Byrne successfully picketed the production of the contested episodes, only for Dove to piece together new performances from outtakes of the existing episodes. This was particularly galling for Byrne as, although the mocked-up episodes are aesthetically indistinguishable from those he intentionally performed in, “spiritually”, he felt, his character came across as “weak; unprofessional; stuttering; desperate” due to the necessary use of incomplete or fluffed lines of dialogue. Despite his contempt for Dove, Byrne approved of and continued to act in the episodes for which the authentic music was available, so as to honour a contract between men. In truth, the contract had only ever existed as a handshake and a long hard stare, which Byrne of course perceived as a moral bond far profounder than any legal document.

The Institute hopes to bring you the fruit of this agreement: the epic, avant-garde yet deeply accessible cycle of true-life adventure films that lay testament to Harley Byrne’s adventures in space, time and sound. And to that end, I put down my brew – cold and untouched – thanked the Future Films whitecoats for their story, and left them to continue their good work, oddly reluctant (as I continued my stroll around the grounds) to put my earphones back in, for what I might – or might not – hear.