Underground by Jem Finer

This music was made to accompany an exhibition of Jock McFadyen's paintings of the London Underground at Grey Gallery, 4 Helmsley Place, London Fields, London, E8 3SB, 25/11/2023 - 18/02/2024.
thegreygallery.com

I’ve always loved Jock’s work and first tried to talk to him when he was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in 1981. The response was frosty but has thawed sufficiently over the years for me to be most honoured to contribute a soundtrack to my hero’s paintings of the underground system.

The first spark of this collaboration came a while ago when Jock started enthusiastically describing the cacophony of the tube ride between Bethnal Green and Liverpool Street.

He asked me if I’d be interested in recording it. Of course ! I too have long been a fan of the tube’s sonic extremes. It took me a while to get around to it and by the time I did the idea had expanded in Jock’s mind to showing a selection of his paintings of the London Underground, accompanied by a soundtrack made from my recordings. Somewhere along the line the single recording of one specific journey had expanded into a broader survey of the sounds of the underground.

I started making recordings, travelling from Kentish Town to Bank on the Northern Line, and then changing to the Central Line to continue to Bethnal Green. At that point I’d ride to and fro between there and Liverpool Street, in an attempt to capture the best quality recording of the journey Jock had once so vividly described.

My first edit of a 20 minute soundscape did justice to Jock’s original intention, being culled from my noisiest and screechiest recordings, with barely a pause between each ear splitting white knuckle ride. This sounded exciting listening back in Jock’s studio, looking at the paintings, but on reflection we realised that it might be alienating to a lot of people and defeat the object of the show, by sending the audience straight back out of the door, running for the relative peace and quiet of the streets of Hackney.

So I went back down into the underground with my microphone and tape recorder and started searching for the subtler ambient sounds of the platforms, the periods of tranquility between trains. The more time I spent in different stations, the more I began to think about the entire underground system as a complex modular instrument in which each platform, every space, is a resonator activated by the sounds occurring both within it and piped in from others, through the hard wiring of adjoining tunnels, corridors and passages.

The second track, Will Arrive in 5 Minutes, was made before the first track, The Next Train on Platform One, and while being largely a carefully constructed and faithful soundscape of field recordings of the London Underground it began to explore a teasing out of the implicit music within the recordings.

Having made it I wanted to go further, to leave the familiar comings and goings of trains, geo-located through announcements, to create something both more abstract and more musical. I hoped to find a resonance with Jock’s paintings where the figurative dissolves into abstraction. I remembered him writing “All paintings are abstract. The subject of all my paintings is the paint”. That always resonated, I feel the same way about sound, about it being the focus of composing. For me the form is important but the sound is the true subject. So I started to flip Jock’s thinking and work with the sounds I’d recorded in the way that he might work with paint, transformed just far enough that there remains a trace of familiarity while becoming something unexpected, newly discovered.

Layering harmonics and drones, tuned to the tube’s pitches, against stretched out and abstracted versions of the original recordings, The Next Train on Platform One became a duet between my hurdy-gurdy and the vast instrument of the underground system. Jem Finer

1.	The Next Train on Platform One	20:07

2.	Will Arrive in 5 Minutes	19:56