Cognitive Mapping the Future

Londonunderlondon, by Mark Fisher and Justin Barton

Prime psychogeography. Millennium Mills, London.

By Charlie Bertsch

Londonunderlondon points a way forward by leading us into the past.

The record derives from walks around the British capital by the late Mark Fisher and Justin Barton.

At least that’s what the two men’s follow-up project On Vanishing Land suggests, since that 2019 release documents a tour of Sussex in a similar manner, overlapping spoken words with various sound effects.

However, whereas On Vanishing Land has a relatively coherent structure, Londonunderlondon is more scattered and fragmentary.

As a decontextualised auditory experience, listening to the record cold inspires disquiet.

Without the context provided by Justin Barton’s notes about londonunderlondon or the fact that it was released on the Flatlines imprint of Steve Goodman’s Hyperdub music label, it would be hard to comprehend.

The sound is often murky, concealing some words and thereby underscoring the easier-to-hear ones. Although this sometimes seems like a mere accident, the result of low-budget recording techniques, the content of the texts gradually makes this quality feel like a deliberate effect.

If it’s hard to determine what londonunderlondon is, it’s even more difficult to determine when.

Someone aware that Mark Fisher took his own life in January 2017 will know that his portion of the record must be dated. But because some of londonunderlondon’s interwoven texts describe a future that has not come to pass, locating it within linear chronology poses a challenge.

This proves to be the case even after reading Barton’s notes, which describe a project conceived in the early 2000s, assembled for a one-off radio broadcast of ninety minutes in 2005, then pared down to the length of a single LP for its reissue this year.

There is also confusion about which portion of the words represents the original creation of Fisher and Barton, since a variety of pre-existing texts surface in the mix.

Lines that stand out do so like the broken columns of an ancient ruin: “He loved the city now that it was deserted, lonely and beautiful.”

In other words, londonunderlondon’s derivation is complex and confusing, as befits a project that embodies the spirit of the Situationist dérive.

It drifts from place to place and time to time, moored primarily by the names of familiar London locations, conjuring a psychogeography as much temporal as spatial.

The most unsettling thing about the reissue of londonunderlondon is how it brings its co-author back from the dead.

Mark Fisher, theorist of hauntology, haunts the record, thereby reminding that all recordings have the potential to extend the human voice into the afterlife.

What makes londonunderlondon particularly poignant for those who loved him is that it captures his stream of consciousness from the period before he was widely known as Mark Fisher, when he could still hide behind the name K-Punk as his favourite Hyperdub artist hid behind the name Burial.

This is the voice of Mark Fisher before he became identified with the phrase “London after the rave.”

In a way, the reissue of londonunderlondon provides a line of flight for Fisher to flee a future that ended up proving intolerable for him, when the recognition he deserved turned into a misrecognition he did not deserve to suffer, exemplified by his essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle” and the malicious personal attacks it inspired.

During the portion of londonunderlondon Fisher delivers, he declares, “Vampires may start out in Romania or Egypt, but they always end up in London.”

This is how he introduces Karl Marx’s famous statement about the vampiric nature of capitalism.

But it could also refer to the city’s recording industry, which continually draws blood from the hinterlands to sustain itself.

Or to the social media platforms that ultimately exacerbated Fisher’s depression, despite the fame they conferred upon him.

It’s worth noting that when he and Justin Barton began the project that would become londonunderlondon, the social media revolution was still in its infancy.

The radical amplification of connectivity facilitated first by MySpace and Friendster, then Facebook and Twitter ultimately cut us off from our psychogeographical roots.

Back when the 90-minute version of londonunderlondon was broadcast in 2005, it was vastly more difficult to construct a cognitive map of a place one had never visited than it is today.

Those London place names that pin the record’s texts down can now be remotely experienced in seconds with a YouTube search. But at what cost?

Maybe what we need now is a way to derive records from our drift through the media as well as physical landscapes.

Londonunderlondon provides a worthy model for this project, aiming to record precisely those socially mediated experiences we are structurally encouraged to discard.

In a world where we face the consequences of algorithmic suppression, long-form audio of the sort Flatlines is putting out still has the potential to serve as a refuge from compulsory forgetting.

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Photograph courtesy of Simon. Published under a Creative Commons license.