Four months ago, in the YouTube comments below ‘the most mysterious song on the internet’, user @jamesnauton2451 commented ‘imagine if this is actually an incredibly well known song from a parallel universe that somehow seeped its way onto the radio just one time in 1984’.
I like this theory – appealing as it does to my delight in reality tunnels, but also to my ongoing interest in moments where the creative act is untethered from the artist, who subsequently receives no recognition.
Have you heard about the most mysterious song on the internet? You can play it on the link below. It’s a minor groove in a sort of gothdoomy new wave mode. Someone recorded it from a German radio station called NDR between 1982 and 1984 and no one knows who made it. There’s a subreddit with 40,000 followers dedicated to the conundrum.
The creative act eh? We make things, float them out into whichever universe we happen to have the luck to currently occupy and then maybe, just maybe, decades later forty thousand people will spend years and years sleuthing and obsessing about who we were.
Last month I asked readers of this substack to tell me about things they had made in 2023 that they were proud of. I got a lovely batch of things in return. I share them beneath with links and a little description.
As you know from your own uncertain and stumbling life, for *some* of the people sharing their work today it will have been a heart-pounding steeling of courage to do so. Putting things into the world is intense and random and inviting the unexpected reaction. Please do give the pieces and creators a little time.
Lucy Radford is the first poet to perform here (at about 8:10). It was an event where artists and scientists came together to explore ways humans engage with each other and the planet.
Rishi Dastidar has a permanent place in my heart as the first person I didn’t know who I dared share some poetry with. We’d connected through social media and he *incredibly* kindly looked through a stack of pieces I was working on. He took the time to respond to each piece with generous, thoughtful, helpful comments and every writer knows what an alchemical transformation this can make to one’s confidence.
Rishi regular appears at all manner of sophisticated poetry events, reviews poetry for The Guardian and his beautiful third collection is just out.
It’s not all poetry. Here’s Michael Gough with how a well-aimed snowball can make more than a dent.
Jim Stafford has made a comic book and all the money goes to charity.
Here’s a twisty waspy poem and artwork from Deborah Velay.
Andrew Eberlin offers us his first photo zine, designed and published earlier this year. In his words ‘a celebration of the much maligned brutalist architecture. Built during a time of post-war optimism, ambition and imagination when a social democratic consensus believed society could make life better for the many. I wanted to show that these buildings can be beautiful (or brutiful)’.
James Caig presents a day trip, the ghost of Andrew Weatherall and some magic.
And finally Nicola Joyce. In her note to me Nicola talked about a journey through 2023 which involved creative writing courses and open mic nights that were initially full of nerves but eventually, triumphantly, slightly-less full of nerves. I’m full of admiration and delighted to share her writing here.
On December 22nd a group of us will be greeting the winter solstice sunrise on Hackney Marshes.
This will complete the first year of meeting to herald the solstice and equinox dawns. A hundred plus people have joined us. We call the gatherings ‘We Don’t Know What This Is’ because we’re not totally sure why we are doing it other than it being a longing, a yearning for light, a dose of positivity, the beginning of everything new, a very human improvisation, a new City Dionysia, a Hackney is an energy, a pomp, a pomp, a pomp, an answer to the corporate death cultists bleeding their shadows over our bliss, a magical act, our pulses pulsing, an intoxicating avant-garde gravity, a manifesto written in mist, a rushing of the rite of the formless, quite a lazy pilgrimage, a delightful vortex of uncertainty, an imagining and a faith, a faith, a faith in us.
Not everything needs a brief.
If you’d like to join us then follow this Instagram for details. Photo above of David Johnston and me by Paul Tait.
Thank you to any readers who joined me at my TypoCircle talk on November 30th. I had a generous hour plus questions and it was the first time since I began trying to be a writer five years ago that I had the opportunity to fully share my approach and philosophy. I really appreciate TypoCircle’s invitation, I think I was the inaugural writer of my kind to be offered a slot in Typo’s forty year history.
Naturally I paid a little homage to my guy Thoth and unnaturally all the lights flickered off in the room as I did so.
I invent worlds, commercial campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. If you favour my ideas and style then please consider sharing my commercial website or my artistic website with the ambitious brand owners or sensitive artistic patrons in your life. I’m an independent practitioner and I do what I do through building partnerships.
I can't get this song out of my head now. This is the best – and by that I mean the most intriguing – thing I've heard in a long while. Are you going to add it to the Very Special Knowledge playlist? I Shazammed it (but of course I did!) and found it on Spotify.
Thank you Thomas for your support and another thoughtful post.