Listening notes: check out clarsach players The Willow Trio: Oystercatcher. Take some time to sketch out an autumnal tree with a 4B pencil, ready to paint when you have time.
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LGAS016 -
LGAS015 Listening notes: Put on Hilbre Island by Don Woods (2021) and check the tide timetable to plan your own visit.
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LGAS0014 Listening notes: Listen to Lou Reed’s 1982 LP The Blue Mask. Think about blue ocean and a cloudless sky, or mist hanging gently on a calm lake. Drift awhile in an influenza fuelled fever. During the song Waves of Fear imagine Little Grapefruit on a grey-green stormy sea, with no escape.
Apologies for the intermittent posts. Blame university deadlines and a trip to Edinburgh to try to work out the origins of the different types of teabag envelopes my mum used for her writing (with no conclusion, as the shops she frequented during visits to the capital change supplier with price fluctuations). Flu, contracted I suspect on the bus, has led to a battle for an extension to my assessments.
FIONA FINKS 15 December 2025
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ARCHIVE REF LGAS013 Listening notes: search out Manannán by Hildegard von Gynku. This was released this year (25 July 2025). It is only a minute long. I do not know if mum knew this piece of music. She disappeared less than a month after the track was released.
Manannan was renowned as a warrior, king and god of people living around the Irish Sea. He leant his name to the Isle of Man.
My mum put bookmarks in favourite volumes. These are little green tea labels on thread, pulled from the used tea bag, or a whole green tea envelope, unfolded. She placed a couple in a book about Remedios Varo. I have catalogued each of these fragments of writing, however apparently trivial. During my archiving I spotted the mention of another Hildegard: the rather more famous one from Bingen, Germany (1098-1179). She was a remarkable woman, composing, and writing extensively on a range of religious and scientific topics. A large amount of her published material and papers survive.
My mum appears to have seen echoes of Hildegard of Bingen in the work of Remedios Varo (Catalan artist, exiled to Mexico 1908-1963). I can see similarities between an illumination in Hildegard’s book Scivias (1151) and some of Varo’s paintings. I see from a Google search that others, including Francisco Rabasso Rodrigues commented on parallels between the two women, noting Varo’s “esoteric practices, and her relation to time as circular or simultaneous”. I learned about this when reading about a manuscript Varo prepared on a sculpture called Homo Rodans. She penned that essay under the pseudonym Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, fictional anthropologist. Going by the sketches I have found as bookmarks, my mum appears to have found the same Wikipedia articles as me.
We will perhaps never know what my mum planned with her Little Grapefruit At Sea sequence. Her opening sentence in the excerpt I am sharing today frames this as a beginning, but written in the past tense. It refers, however, to events we have already read about in previous posts, some of which were written in the present tense. The ordering of these pieces is therefore challenging and up for interpretation. A loop of time perhaps, like Varo.
The Catalan artist also features in the forthcoming book GANTOB’s 25 Paintings, contributor copies of which are currently in the possession of The Benefaktor, who has also gone missing, last heard of on the Isle of Man in October 2025.
FIONA FINKS, 13 December 2025
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ARCHIVE REF: LGAS012 Listening notes: While you have Big Star’s Radio City (1973) on the turntable, listen to the track What’s Going Ahn.
Reflect on how you would leave things if you knew that you wouldn’t get a chance to come back to them.
Gillian Finks left her papers in a mess. This story will need editing (eg for tense, grammar, spelling). This particular green tea slip is particularly sloppy. It’s almost as if she was on the ferry with Little Grapefruit and Michelle, writing it leaning on the railings, looking out over the Mersey, pencil falling off the edge of paper as the ship slipped out into the open sea.
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ARCHIVE REF: LGAS011 Listening notes: put on Big Star’s 1973 LP Radio City. Think of Liverpool rather than Memphis. Enjoy the album in its own right rather than looking for hidden meanings.
The Masters Student (Fiona Finks) notes the challenges of ordering a story that jumps around in tense, in an apparently random pile, with no numbering. The geography does not always fit with the real world either. Currently there are 35 green tea slips that potentially fit into this story. Only FF has seen them all.
The archive references are TMS’s own. There may well be missing episodes, lost between floorboards. She has also found a lost story by The Benefaktor.
TMS is glad that she’s almost on holiday. She will be able to spend a bit more time excavating her mother’s papers. Then she will start transcribing and revising the story.
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ARCHIVE REF: LGAS010 Listening notes: dial up Susumu Yokata’s 2005 album Symbol. Listen to the first track, Long Long Silk Bridge. Think about things you have always wanted to do, and make plans to do them.
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ARCHIVE REF: LGAS009 The Masters Student, AKA Fiona Finks notes the following: My Mum usually uses a propelling pencil. But for this post she appears to have used an ordinary HB. There are none of the marks from snapped leads.
Using “diplomatic”, as it’s called in archiving, tells me that it’s her work. Familiar themes. The right handwriting. Her preferred type of tea slip.
Listening notes on the back that refer to Train Track Noises, a track from Keith Holzman’s Authentic Sound Effects, Volume 2. There are some familiar sounds elsewhere on the LP that my Mum would know.
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ARCHIVE REF: LGAS008 Listening notes: listen to Can’s LP Future Days (1973). Imagine yourself on a wet day in Inverness in a debate with a room of music students. Though you were born in 1970, you have not heard this album before. You can hear rhythms that sound like a train journey, or perhaps placental pulsings. Your first experience of ambient music was through The Orb or The KLF, circa 1990. The students, though a third your age, think you should have started with Can. They have not heard of The Orb or The KLF. You think about words and tenses: can/ could have, shall/ should have. You tell the students you have never had a joint and never plan to. They will you on. You make to leave. You have marking to do.
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ARCHIVE REF: LGAS007 Listening notes: put on the LP Great Day (1972) by Simon Haseley and Peter Reno. When you get to the track Hammerhead, read the above post, while stroking a white cat, or tabby if you can’t find one. Imagine that the easy listening track is a cover of The Offspring’s 2008 track of the same name. Tap your feet to the guitars, trombones, trumpets, drums, harp, violins, cellos, xylophone and flutes of messers H and R. Think awhile about James Bond themes that never were. Afterwards, eat a segment of tinned grapefruit, in juice rather than syrup. Sit for the rest of the album, thinking of sunny days by the sea, watching porpoises and fulmar. If you have sticky hands, don’t wipe them on the cat.
GANTOB blog 