Listening notes from Ali Finks: I searched for a suitable track for this post and came across Parallax by Sun Electric. It took me back to 1991. I was studying in Edinburgh at that time. During breaks from the library I would head down to the plethora of record shops in the centre of the city. As a KLF completist I was delighted to find a copy of Sun Electrics O’Locco on 12″ in Fopp. I spotted that there were remixes by The Orb and Jimmy Cauty. Or perhaps I had read that there were and went out to snare a copy. I can’t remember the details. I think it might have been on clear vinyl. I used to listen to all the tracks in one sitting while studying at night. It was hypnotic and addictive, predicting the snippets of samples peppered throughout the different versions.
Listening notes: think about songs revived and repurposed. Play any version of The Bells of St Mary’s (written 1917 by A. Emmett Adams and Douglas Furber). This was resurrected by Bing Crosby in 1945 (in a film with the same title) and many artists since. It had acquired an association with Christmas, snow falling on snow, ever since. There isn’t a yuletide meaning in the lyrics themselves.
Here Gillian Finks gives it rather a sinister twist as she imagines a threatened shipwreck just off Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man.
Listening notes: Hunt down A Camp LP (2001) by A Camp. Listen all the way through, while remembering lessons in algebra. Paint in the outline of a sketch of Manannan, his arms and hands mere tendrils of mist, enveloping an unsuspecting ferry, approaching Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man. Think about white horses in the Irish Sea, carrying St Patrick to Peel. Read about Nina Persson, Niclas Frisk and Nathan Larsson. And remember the late Mark Linkous, AKA Sparklehorse.
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.
GANTOB blog 