For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

The underside of a banana slug. The snout of some big game.
Some excrescence to be dealt with in the preparation of some
exotic foodstuff. The combined foreheads of an entire residential
home on the brink of closure, bowing to the pressures of
a suspicious inquiry. The thickened space between. Unimaginable
on Neptune or any of its moons. It’s an internal texture,
a non-surface not meant to be touched; it is a non-surface,
absolutely indescribable because – under any other circumstances
bar invasive surgery – it would not be exposed to
any kind of NERVOUS APPREHENSION. No sense would
EVER perceive of its existence. So it smells of nothing, looks
like nothing, feels like nothing, sounds like NOTHING. Only
here, at the back of this
frozen cave, the surface
springs into vivid,
terrible being at the
first touch of your
trembling fingers:
every sense is ar-
rested simultaneously,
bombarded
with EXTREME
PREJUDICE!:
– A great rent in the PRECIOUS silence
of the cave. A
glissando of atonal
percussion founded
upon a shifting, clay
bed of sub-bass; a thick seam of brass pumping vast swathes
of ridiculously oiled muscle, torn, sprained, PULLED into
taut potentials, suspended, irresolute chords spinning the
treble and carving a fresh tunnel down and to the left of your
ear drum, circumventing those flimsy bones, those trilobite
coils of cartilage – skipping the need for the hairs, twinned
with the cilla that wigs your fucking lungs, that waft to the
movement of the air that, etc. etc. None of that. A brutal hole
gouged out of your inner-ear, leading straight to that dank
region of the brain, seldom used, that can be purposed kinetically.
A Harry Partch instrument, unrealised. – A Polyphonic
Microtonal Spirit Organ (PMSO). This sound is not sound.