Audio Memory
Two years at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, CD 1998
Towards the end of my time at The Jan van Eyck Akademie, I was in very reflective mood about my time there, which was essentially the end of my formal education that had started twenty years earlier. Attending the van Eyck had been an incredible journey, both personally and professionally - a lot of ups and downs on either front, but I’d made it out the other side with a body of work that I’m still proud of, and with significantly better, stronger emotional intelligence. I’d arrived there a scared, uncertain indie kid who thought he was going to be an art critic, and left as a confident interactive designer. I’d fallen in love, travelled, had some incredible experiences, and made a few friends for life along the way. Through it all I’d maintained close ties with my friends back in London, often visiting during the academic breaks to stay with them.
At the end of the final semester, I made a collection of music to remember everything by, and I gifted copies of these to all of those kind souls who’d helped along the way. I made the CD mainly for myself of course, and all of these songs hold a very strong, specific archival resonance for me. Over the course of the past year I’ve become a lot more nostalgic about my old work, and the times I had during my higher education in particular. So here’s what was on that original CD, and I’ve also included the liner notes I wrote at the time, which continue to act as prompts for some great memories.
As an update, I’ve also included some new liner notes from 2020, 22 years after the initial thoughts were put down.
Euro 96, Gazza vs. Scotland, Three Lions, and a sad but expectant Eurostar departure…
Nothing captures the spirit of what it felt like to live in London in the mid-nineties more than this song. Commercialized by the movie Trainspotting, I must have listened to this hundreds of times while working in the computer studio at the Jan van Eyck, and whenever and wherever I am when I hear it, I always think of late night trips to Bar Italia, kebabs on the Kings Road, after-hours bars in SoHo, and the night bus back to Kingston. It was one of the strong ties back to London that helped maintain a strong sense of balance and the feeling of ‘I am not here to stay’ during my time in Holland.
Train journeys through Europe, giving up the world of gigs, Britpoppers and the LA2…
I think I listened to this one on the Eurostar from London to Brussels as I moved to Holland for the first time. I was always more of an Oasis fan than a Blur fan, but this one in particular was a real highlight on Parklife for me. I’d loved ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ and remember often listening to that on the train trips back and forth between Holland and London. The video for End Of A Century in particular truly captures the spirit of those gigs at the time, which were just getting bigger and bigger as the Britpop bubble grew and grew. I love the lyrics to this one, and it always transports me back to my time in London.
DJing at the JVE parties, Geri vs. Baby, Elizabeth’s JVE Spice Girl popularity poll…
I’ve always unashamedly been a Spice Girls fan. Aside from their offstage antics as a group, I just fell in love with the music itself, this song in particular, and I have fond memories of watching this video over and over on MTV Europe while surfing the lone computer hooked up to the internet in the JvE library at 2am. In my second year at the academy I made a CD-ROM weaving an interactive narrative between Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ and the demise of the Spice Girls.
Working in the studio upstairs, experiments in the computer room, insecurities around working…
As is usual with most two-year courses, I made a lot of mistakes in my first year. A lot. I spent a great deal of time in my studio, working out what I really wanted to work on, struggling to learn how to use a computer, reading, and essentially trying not to freak out while figuring it out. Suede’s ‘Coming Up’ and Belly’s ‘Star’ were pretty much the soundtrack to me doing all of that. Whenever I hear this I think of Studio 224, and can picture exactly where everything was in that room.
More and more beer, the JVE Christmas party 1996, 5 go back to Blighty…
Parties were notorious at the Jan van Eyck during my time there. Every couple of months, there would be a ‘socializing’ event put on by the institution to help the participants get to know each other better. Most of us had come from all over the world, and it was unusual for you to be on your course with anyone else from your own country. The events usually consisted of a small-scale sound system, some snacks, and lots of lots of beer. Always full of dancing, they were always a great time, especially when the visiting professors joined in, and even though it was forbidden by academy rules, most of us all ended up sleeping in our studios those nights, unable to get home.
Simon’s New Year party, mental in the kitchen, the grown men in the bedroom…
This one has a very specific reference attached to it. New Year’s Eve 1996. It’d been a hell of a year - I’d graduated from Kingston, moved to Holland, fallen in love for the first time in a very long time, and I had a lot to celebrate. I spent New Year’s Eve at a party in Battersea, where we pretty much destroyed the host’s kitchen by dancing to this at maximum volume many times over. A couple of years later after I’d moved back to London I broke my arm falling over some garbage bins on the way to see The Chemical Brothers at the Brixton Academy. I still went and danced all night, even though my elbow had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. I still can’t bend my left arm all the way, but it was all worth it.
Plane trips to Vienna, making interactive work, Stichting neighbors, computer room living…
More from the insulated, isolated world of my headphones during my time at the Jan van Eyck. This isn’t the version I listened to, as that was mainly the remixed version on the ‘Rest Of’ album from New Order, but this is hands down the best song of all time, and I will fight you if you disagree. The lines ‘You took my time and you took my money. Now I feel you’ve left me standing, in a world that’s so demanding’ is the perfect encapsulation of how I felt at the time.
The anthem of all things techno in the JVE basement…
Perhaps it was all the time I was spending on trains through Europe, but during my time at the van Eyck I became a really big Kraftwerk fan, inhaling their back catalog as I worked late into the night in the computer studio. This song in particular brings back strong memories of the particular kind of work I was doing around video games and virtual environments, stripping otherwise sophisticated games back to their core constituent elements. Kraftwerk also helped me, and continues to help me, appreciate the beauty in the simple when it comes to the web.
Out alone in the Arizona desert, recovery and recuperation, severance from all things Austrian…
My trip to Arizona during the summer of 1997 was instrumental and transformative for many reasons, but mainly because it was a well earned mental break from what had been an incredibly intense year personally and professionally. It allowed me to reset, to decompress, and to discover what would end up being a large track of work during my second year around virtual environment building and game design. I’d often watch VH1 and MTV during my time there, and the amazing video for Whip It was often in constant rotation.
Pearscroft Road, Diana dies, Cadogan Arms, Troy’s Bar and intensive CD hunting…
It was never cool to like Hanson, but this is a killer, and I always loved this one. I’d bought the CD during my time over the summer of 1997 in Phoenix, and tortured my friends with it upon arriving back in London for the remainder of the break before the fall semester started up again in September. I have a very vivid recollection of exactly where I was when I heard that Diana had died. We’d been out to the all-night indie club at the Astoria, and upon arriving back home and having some tea and toast, we turned on the TV to hear that there’d been an accident in Paris, but that they didn’t really know what had happened. Then we crashed out, but when we woke up in the morning around 11am, Tony Blair, only recently made Prime Minister, was on the TV talking about the People’s Princess. “My God, she’s died” I remember saying to my friend.
A couple of weeks later we went out dancing all night again, and I remember taking the bus through Central London and seeing everyone camped out for the funeral that was the following day. I don’t remember if I went back, or if I stayed out all night instead of going home, but somewhere I walked over to Westminster Abbey, on my own, and was in the crowd near the door where all the celebrities were arriving in the morning. You could hear a pin drop when those two princes were walking behind the funeral carriage, and everyone burst into tears outside when Elton John sang. I distinctly remember a really large policeman, who had been facing the crowd on the other side of the barrier, openly weeping as Diana’s brother gave his speech.
As I walked the 3-4 miles back to the flat in Fulham, on my own, with my own thoughts, I remember thinking things would never be the same again. And that the Britpop party we’d been enjoying was most definitely over.
I’d always loved the Aphex Twin, especially after I found that Richard had been a student at Kingston University and lived at Clay Hill Halls of Residence. During my time at the van Eyck, he became more widely known, especially with the ‘Come To Daddy’ and ‘Windowlicker’ singles. Whenever I visited London to stay with friends, we always spent a lot of time record shopping, mainly at the enormous HMV and Tower Records stores on Oxford and Regent Streets (vinyl shopping on Berwick Street and Camden came much later). It was here that I doubled down on my Aphex Twin collection, exploring all the weird and wonderful experiments he’d put out over the years.
His catalog usually breaks down into two distinct types - the highly experiment, dissonant and avant garde songs, and the more melodic ambient tunes. Flim is a b-side on the ‘Come To Daddy’ single, and was always one of my favorites of his. I used this as intro music for the menu designs of the virtual environment games I was producing at the time.
My generation’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, it’s easy to forgot how unusual this was when it first came out, especially since Radiohead’s last album ‘The Bends’, and what a huge departure it was for them at the time. I’d never really been a big Radiohead fan before OK Computer, and famously went to see Velocity Girl instead of them at The Reading Festival one year. One of the other designers at the van Eyck had been listening to this a lot in the computer studio, and I decided to give it a few listens, and was hooked from there.
The ‘proposal’ referenced in the liner notes ended up being a large scale interactive CD-ROM weaving a narrative where Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ was a disguised tale of the demise of the (then massive) Spice Girls. That project was a lot of fun, and I’d really been enjoying how the internet was able to weave a lot of these kinds of things together through message board conversations.
Solitary late night weekend work at the computer dungeon, headphones on…
If there’s one song that sums up what it felt like to study at the Jan van Eyck during my time there, the one song that will forever transport me back to that time in my life, the one song that rips my heart out with unforgiving malice every time, it’s this one. I’d seen Leaving Las Vegas during my time in Phoenix, and spent a week there during that time too. This song is from the soundtrack. While it most definitely appealed to everything I loved about America, there’s an inherent sadness to the place, especially late at night. The movie really touches on a lot of that melancholy, and I felt as if a hand had come out from the screen, taken mine, and told me that they felt the same way I did.
This sadness of the city mixed with personal emotion at the time with the breakdown of my relationship, which was simply unable to be sustained over such a long distance, and ended without clear resolution as we both drifted away from each other without closure. Whenever I hear this song, I think of her, and it’s as if Sting is taking the thoughts in my head and reading them back to me. I listened to that soundtrack on repeat for months during my second year, and looking back I clearly sought solace in my headphones, and tuned the world out completely. But to this day I find this a hard listen.
Moving to Wandsworth, mingeta, wideshire, around the world twice in 5 days…
There’s not a whole lot to say about this one, other than it’s one of my all-time favorite songs, and always gets included in any mixtape I make. This is one of my best friend’s favorite songs as well, and we’d both broken up with our girlfriends over the summer in 1997, so were both grieving a bit and feeling sorry for ourselves in the pub most of the time. But Thousand Yard Stare always lifted our spirits, this one in particular - I can’t listen to this and not smile. I wish they had never reformed though - it’s tough to see them as old men.
Ill in bed, Midnight Cowboy, pasta sauces, Pooky, painting white walls…
I don’t really remember why this one made the cut, but it’s certainly very ‘of the moment’ for the time where I came back to England after my time in Holland, and just regrouped and recharged after an incredibly intense two years away. I’d listen to XFM in my small bedsit apartment in Kingston, and get back up to speed on the indie music of the time, essentially having taken a hiatus during my time at the van Eyck. It was there I discovered Embrace, who ended up being one of my favorites for a few years afterwards, well into the QVC years. I’d been listening to Cornershop since the early nineties, but to hear them with a big, remixed hit on their hands was really unusual at the time. These days, just the phrase corner shop brings back lots of good English-only memories of the student years.
