No Disc // No Future: Two Seconds of Risk Assessment

   There is a section of the 2020 No Disc record ‘Risk Assessment’, one of the final records recorded at the practice rooms at CHUNK in Leeds, entitled ‘Eat Your Landlord’. It’s a four track suite recorded in a long stretch with little to no editing. During this section you can hear the sound of a drummer bleeding through from the next room.

Specifically, this moment can be heard during the last two seconds of ‘Eat Your Landlord 2’. This was an entirely accidental inclusion, but its purely coincidental thematic relevance was very obvious when I first listened to the recording back. As I now begin to untangle my personal experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, if I may, I would like to talk about why I find these two seconds so significant.

No Disc - Risk Assessment

Artwork by Theo Gowans

Risk Assessment can be viewed as our pandemic record. The title was a direct reference to when Theo and I were talking about just going outside in those early stages of lockdown; specifically, something Theo said about how even the act of going to the shops felt like it required you to do a risk assessment first.

There was text included in the notes on the Risk Assessment bandcamp, which was really nothing more than an edited down version of rambling messages I sent to Theo when we were talking about recording during the pandemic, which reads as follows:

Ramblings.*

For context, during the period of the pandemic that this record was made I had gone back to reading Mark Fisher, specifically ‘Ghosts of My Life’**. I was trying to make sense of how it felt to live through a time when all of our reasonable plans and expectations of the future were cancelled. Whereas Fisher talks of the “slow cancellation of the future”, it felt as though the future had been immediately cancelled, not to resume until further notice, if indeed it was to resume at all.

One of the major elements of ‘Ghosts of My Life’ is the concept of Hauntology, a term explored by Jacques Derrida which deals with the idea that the presence of something always implies an absence of something else. These absences innately colour and alter our understanding of the thing that is present, and that such absences act as the ghosts of these ideas. These ideas, not through their presence but by the awareness of their potential, make themselves relevant to our understanding of what is present.

Mark Fisher - Ghosts of My Life [Zer0 Books - 2014]

The example often given is in Derrida’s refutation of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History and The Last Man’, whereby Fukuyama triumphantly declares history to have ended as a result of the disbanding of the Soviet Union, that capitalism had won, and the struggle between these ideas would bring forward some kind of stability. Derrida’s refutation of this was that, even though it had achieved dominance, capitalism was forever haunted by the spectre of communism because our understanding of capitalism and the structures implemented within it had been defined in opposition to communism and, as such, the existence and absence of communism had become part of the fabric of capitalism itself.***

The direction Mark Fisher takes is one of lost futures; he considers the futures once dreamt possible being rendered impossible by the march of time. What speculative fiction and ideals of future techno-utopias may have conceived as possible is rendered impossible by the conditions that actually arise. Fisher approaches this largely by looking at media, particularly media that invokes nostalgia, either for a past that no longer exists, or an alternative present that can no longer exist.

This is what I’d like to talk about.

During the course of the pandemic we’ve all had our lives either put on hold, or our plans fully terminated and replaced by an unending uncertainty. We’ve had to learn to accept a constant state of anxiety, stress, and boredom. For most of us, particularly the young, it’s nothing new to experience life as a state of constant precarity. The scale of this precarity is different. The paralysing reliance on our governments to institute the kinds of policies which might keep us safe, but which (visibly and often) fail to do so.

We all had hopes and ambitions before all of this which have either been cancelled or radically altered as a result of the pandemic. Personally, at the time this was all about to happen, I was involved in the local collective ‘CHUNK’; a large collective of musicians and bands which at the time ran and operated a DIY practice room and venue space in Leeds. We had recently changed the organisational structure of it, which gave us the ability to be reasonably confident that we would be able to continue operations after years of scraping by and financial hardship. The pandemic swiftly quashed these hopes, resulting in the decision to leave our home of six years. The collective’s job for the rest of 2020 would be to slowly clear out the building for it to be delivered back to the landlords in November.

I had also been unemployed during the first few waves of the pandemic. I could no longer afford the rent on my home and had to leave with no fixed address to go to, so as not to get into arrears I could never pay off, despite a nationwide ban on evictions. During the second half of 2020 a large part of my time was spent moving my own possessions into storage, and throwing out, selling, giving away, and finding places to store much of CHUNK’s house gear.

At the time of the recording of Risk Assessment, in August of 2020, I was at no fixed address and staying at a friend’s place; all plans for 2020 firmly cancelled.

The drummer captured on ‘Eat Your Landlord 2’ was a close friend, Steve Myles. Steve Myles has been most notable in recent years for playing drums in the legendary local Leeds band Cattle. Ahead of the pandemic I had become involved in a new band of his, Squabble, which also featured Lewis Millward of Thank, and No Disc’s very own Territorial Gobber Theo Gowans. Squabble had been due to record our first round of cacophanies in the April of 2020, a live recording which would have been put out as a warning shot against anyone who would otherwise have hap-hazardly considered stumbling into any live gigs we would be performing.

Squabble live at the Brudenell Social Club, Feb 2020

Photo by James A Mumby Photography

This recording session was obviously cancelled as we were under the strict, and honestly understandable, requirement to stay indoors with only our households, and not to mix in crowded rooms and breathe heavily whilst playing extremely noisy music.

These plans never came of anything due to the sudden and sharp cancellation of the future.

That being said, these absences have a tendency to bleed-through; for two seconds at the end of ‘Eat Your Landlord 2’ Steve Myles was playing drums in the room next to us. He was playing one of his drum parts for the Squabble record.

During the recording of Risk Assessment, a record that would not have happened without the pandemic, and that was mired in the angst of living through the tragic situation whereby our loved ones were being stripped of us in their tens of thousands, and during which it was impossible to attend their funerals, there was a ghost of an alternative present, and that ghost is the closest we’ll ever get to the elusive Squabble record.

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* - In all honesty, I never actually liked how this text block read, but I felt as though coming up with something else or transforming the sentiment too much would distort the authenticity of the sentiment, so I was happy for it to go up. Part of the ethos behind Risk Assessment was to maintain a straightforward approach and not fuck with it too much.

** - You may recognise certain track titles on Risk Assessment lifted directly from Mark Fisher’s work as a not-so-subtle nod as to where I was personally at during all of this.

*** This is my layman’s interpretation, this is not an academic blog and no, I will not cite my sources. You can’t make me.

Thanks to Theo Gowans for helping me edit this post.