Liner Notes on Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º° Joy, Oh I Missed You °º
/ INTRACTING AIR
It’s as though there’s a bubble around each of us. Not a bundle, nor a self, both of which imply a belt that binds around the midriff, a solid clasp, a touch of military discipline. If anything, it’s more like those loose worn rings around Saturn, close to a forcefield, but made up of debris. And when you pause and consider it, all bubbles are in fact debris fields, tiny afterbursts from the propulsive force of your breath as it pushes past an aperture, spray of output from the nigh-unsummable calculations those suds enact, as that sustaining air’s enclosed in the most minimal surface area of a sphere that can hold it; an almost still, hovering orb of vacancy.
Or, other times, bubbles are blast radii from the shearing rub of soapbar against plunging posser stick, liquid grit from hard scrubshunts against ribbed washboards, group jam sessions down the steamie. Sometimes the media objects that we produce feel like bubbles, especially when it comes to song (defined loosely) recordings: part bounded breath, part after-rattle of odd apparati as they are beaten away at or strummed. In their distribution too, foam from digital oceans that spumes towards our ear’s inner membrane, they resemble bubbles: they float between us, meld, pop.
‘The double bubble conjecture’ is fun to say but, as a theorem, hard to prove. Dreamt up by Archimedes (a second sudsy reverie from his steamy bathing rituals you hope) but vaporous for roughly 2202 years. This is in part because its verification depended upon globbing together so many adjacent clods of research: Jean Taylor’s proof of Plateau's laws on the structure of soap films, arguments from symmetry, proof by exhaustion, the compactness of rectifiable currents… in short, the theorem shows that two merged soap bubbles provide the optimum way of enclosing two given volumes of air of different size with the least surface area. Side point, soap bubbles assume the shape of the least surface area possible which will contain a given volume. In this sense, they are analogue computers, instantly modelling and adapting to complex real spaces. So, if bubbles, from when the seas first formed and began to roil, were proto-computers, was a double bubble encounter the first ping network, the communal wash house that folk in Scotland called a steamie a nascent-internet?
/ DIGITAL POP
We start, then, with two senses of bubbles: as thin membrane surrounding whatever it is that we are; as a clumpy but light debris field produced by others that we can drift through, merge with, collide into: that we are popped by and sometimes pop in turn.
It may sound at this point like I’m just blowing bubbles, which is to say talking shite: “dreaming dreams, scheming schemes, building castles high”. In fact, I’m listening to a record. It’s called ‘Joy, Oh I Missed You’, and despite my attempt to maintain an icy rationality, to keep my cool, what burbled up to the surface in my thoughts was this odd dyad that’s hidden in plain sight when we see bubbles.
Listening to it, I thought about bubbles, I even ‘saw’ them, small ones, stoaters. I thought about the childhood thrill of watching them blossom into vacant space. There’s a magic to their scatter, a tension or electricity; it’s not too far from lightning, this casting of a pattern that charges air, makes it take shape, quiver. It’s no too far either from how music grapples with bare clock time, lends it form, asap; how it lets things inside our blobby thoughts and desires bubble to the surface, plumes gluggy and irresolvable problems into new patterns, spindrifts.
As I listened, I also thought ‘this is thrilling’. Just those three words (though the thought- bubble recurred several times it’s true) of which the last word was clearly the most loaded with static: thrilling. What do we mean when we say sounds thrill us? A friend of mine, called Callum, once flung out a phrase that I have been more or less caught up in ever since: surface thrills. Some sets of sounds, conversions of vibrations from plastic to speaker, some rushes of bits by way of bluetoothed wormhole to our in-ear-buds thrill us. There’s a crackle as the surfaces rub, as they pass into us.
Thrill, from the Old English þȳrlian, means ‘to pierce’; a word that follows logically from þȳrel ‘hole’. And it makes sense, a thrill is a bristling action, a flutter of the fuzz that coats our skin, the backs of our necks: joy, we say to ourselves, I missed you. There is a terrifying openness to the ear, which unlike an eye’s lid we cannot close. To be thrilled by something is to be penetrated, punctured… or is it? Has our language got snagged somewhere here, caught on a spur of male desire? Because while to thrill may mean to pierce, to pierce only means to pass through; it was some bored Latin scribe who likely spun it towards that sense of perforate. To pass through, a passability. Not so much puncturing, its notions of depth, but grazed edges, amalgams. Much like how one bubble bursts another, not by way of a jab but by a risky moment of melding, joining, a surface tension that comes out as ‘pop!’
So, when I say this record is thrilling, I guess I mean it’s pop music. Which is to say it passes lithely through the thin membrane of memory, hurt, hope and all the other efflorescence that I call, for convenience, my-self and it bursts that barrier as it joins with me: we could call this joy. This spherical rub, this depth of contact on the surface. Let’s intentionally, absurdly, in a way that emphasises that very absurdity cite one example, ‘What Will Tomorrow Bring’ by Wendy Rene, from the infinitely expanding playlist of imperfectly perfect pop songs. There’s a drift and a surface crackle in the cut between “what will tomorrow bring… joy to my heart…” the coil back around to “I wonder what I'll say… I’ve got to know” the insistent keys that rile up the doubts and hopes into a lather. it finds the hidden verb in pop music’s noun: and what does popular mean anymore anyway?
'Joy, Oh I Missed You'. It’s supple, moving nimbly like bubbles arcing in vacant air. Or better sapple, another word from the steamy bucket of Scotslang, it’s saturated with suds. Sapple and supple. That’s not to say effortless. Tell anyone washing their way through a mound of their extended family’s underclothes that they make it look effortless and they’ll rightly bop you with their laundry paddle. The two bods behind this sudsy swirl, worked well hard to make it happen, gave it yaldy. Not a brutal, raspy blootering, but a wise, precise but insistent working on the snag points of a series of problems, fermenting them, impelling them to bubble up to the surface; a sappled yaldy, concept-suds with some frothing force behind them.
/ TEENAGE TELEMETRY
And could we also call it Post-Bubblegum pop? Like that music, there’s something that speaks to our shared adolescences in it, to the mis-steps and mis-laid desires of those years, the sticky black box of trauma that globs up inside us. And we should put a hard emphasis on the ‘gum’ when we say it, Post-Bubble-Gum-Pop, as in the tissue that tucks beneath our jaws, clomps our teeth in place. And it’s post-bubble-pop music in another sense too. Part of that set of tone seeking teams, where you feel the pressure of rent prices, the working-from-home collaboration, in short the after 2010s austerity-ising (austereing?) of our shared world that seeps into that world’s courageously blown liquid assets and late nights after work pipe dreams: which is to say, into its cultural objects. In a good way, you can tell they produced this set of sounds around employment, gig work, stolen days of focussed time. So much pop is bubbly in this sense too: “what will tomorrow bring… will it be sadness”. That was three Ands. Post-Bubblegum, Post-Gum, Post-Bubble. Let’s start a spin cycle going between all three.
Post-Bubblegum. Let’s worry away at the soapy border between bubble and bundle for a few rinses and rotations. Could adolescence, its traversal, its traumas, give us some idea why bubble seems the more compelling concept (or, following Lyotard, a cloud of bubbles)?
So bundle, that’s Hume. Simplifying to the extreme, his idea implies a centre. Aye for sure, there’s progress here on Locke’s clarty old cloth of there being, again simplifying to the x, a single-continuous-substance that constitutes, or lies behind, a self, but in Hume’s bundle there’s still a middle, a core, a clumping: irreducible to any of its parts, but solid, mappable. In short, there’s ownership, property. We can see this in the Humean inheritance that runs through much, but not all, of neuroscience. This brain, that belongs to this person, with those bounded thoughts. What would we call the middle of a cloud of moving bubbles? Well, we could calculate it but in any case it’d be a vacancy. Or where is the hard drawn line between a thought-bubble that rises from my head and the language that I use and the concepts I have learned and the vocal twitches I say it with and the class dynamics around that moment of articulation. All the action, it seems, is happening in the moments of contact, of accounting with others (people and not-people), which is to say reckoning with them, coming into relation with them, feeling that surface thrill.
Course, Hume and his interpreters move very carefully, and I’m just churning wildly, frothing at the mouth. Butler’s ‘Giving An Account Of Oneself’ is where you should go for the full, steady, immeasurably surerhanded account of what I’m merely a spare sock swirling around in here. Still, I had to take a spin at it, because it came to the surface repeatedly while I listened to ‘Joy, Oh I Missed You’, while I tried to place who was producing these sounds, which person, and then realised that was the wrong question. And that it was asking a different, more compelling series of them about the slippy boundaries (language starts to fail here, sound persists) between what we call self and memory, or self and technology, or self and trauma, self and others, and language, and expression, and our past selves.
As infants, there’s a terrifying openness we had to the world. Adolescence, we start hardening that bubble around us into a forcefield; it’s like we’re forming a slick shield, or shell around ourselves as. The molten sap of our traumas, awkwardnesses, misfires. Loose sketched thought: does that mean real joy begins in adolescence, because forming that debris field around ourselves is also the beginning of the chance for it to be burst. And that’s what many teens seek eh. Thrills. Moments where that clouds of bubbles around them, that bubble wrap that encloses the fragile brokenness all of us bear, pop. This happens in a million different forms of course. Some are quiet, shy, careful, entirely online or virtual. It all counts. Moments of contact in any case.
Again, this is not necessarily with other people, though it often is. Sometimes it’s a tune that creates that moment of rub, fret, contact, thrill. None of this can be reduced to a single substance, or bundle, that we are confronting a separate world that we make contact with. There’s a porosity, a passability (we're beyond a simple penetrative model here). It’s as the Ramone said in Teenage Lobotomy, their three minute thesis on the limits of a neurologically reductive (rather than inclusive) model of trauma and experience, ‘Guess I’ll have to break the news, that I’ve got no mind to lose’. There’s a close, complicated relation between the cloud of bubbles that we are, and the bubblegum pop of bored teenage nights, the thrill of fizzy poprocks. Dweebs, after all, were a candy as well as a fairly accurate description of any of us at that age.
/ BREAKS OF FLOW
Post-Bubble. Nightclubs are declining rapidly: there’re seventy percent fewer than twenty years ago according to some studies. Rehearsal studios are experiencing less sharp, but similar trends. Music production, rehearsal and even performance, are now multiple-occupying our domestic spaces: spare rooms or spare metres in bedrooms becoming studios and gigspace. Side note, here ‘bubble’ really is nothing more than a metaphor; what happened was a landgrab and cash-snatch by a bunch of all-too-Humean bampots, but now I think of it the barm bit before the pot means the froth found on the top of a fermenting liquid, so bubbles seem to be blowing out here too… I digress…
Now, invoking historical sites of reproduction, gendered, risks reinscribing current media productions by non-men into set modes of approach and judgment, gendered. Which is to say I'm aware of a risk I'm about to run. But this tendency, this drag inwards to the domestic in music production and performance ran up against another presence that lay beneath all those bubbles as I listened: the Steamie, defunct collective wash houses.
Clothes washing was pinned long ago to the curve that music production is bound on, sliding from sloppy shared public experience to that tight space squeezed beneath a faux-marble countertop in a boxy kitchen. Weirdly, this coincides with the burst of a previous speculative bubble in the seventies, but sometimes coincidences are just that.
Somehow I heard a Steamie. Given the conditions of imposed scarcity we’re all trying to scrabble together a bit more shared capacity in, it was likely a digital one, an emanation from a mesh of moments, of files passed back and forth, but still it was there. The bubbles weren’t coming from a single source: the factory model of a chimney, the romantic reverie of a caterpillar’s puffed pipe. They were floating up from a shared space, a public space. There's a joy in this determined reopening of our shuttered collective spaces, that records like this can do, that this one does, diffusing into then suffusing the room you play it in, that strange virtual or better vacant space created when you slip on or in headphones, as though you blanked out the sovereign centrality of the brain, ‘piped some air into its dread’: “Now I guess I'll have to tell’em, that I've got no cerebellum”.
And it’s more of a laundrette, let’s be honest, than a steamie. We’re operating within a different technological stage here. I imagine those walls of wash barrels rumbling and thrashing around. Electrified, all wired up together: a different sort of drum-machine. Aye, that’s how it sounds to me. As if these are rhythm hits, torsions of those bubbling tumblers, but rather than a single stab, each bobble makes a field of foam gush out of open washdrum doors. It’s intermittent, deftly manipulated. There’s a minimal watchfulness to it, a deterred urgency to it: a detergency that dazzles.
/ PURE SILICON DOES NOT CONTAIN WATER
Post-Gum. Let's end by passing through where bubbles are blown from, to another pink and fleshy surface: the cords and folds of the larynx. What Lyotard calls the soundproof-chamber which itself produces an intimate register of sounds.
While its stain’s been bleached out of the up front fabric of the record, there's an entire and intricate process of technological and techno-biological vocal production, stretching, slurring, stuttering, salivating, estranging, and, yes, frothing that's just out of sight here; a ‘moronic gestalt’ that refuses the false choice between expression and experimentation. An associated series of brand names: Montreal Affective Voice, Voice Based Analysis in Psychiatric Diagnosis, Anikin and Person, Vocaloid, Descript, Notebook LM, the Epic-Games Market. Still, while AI technologies (the least well defined two words in this entire spiel) and their ‘repertoires of confession’ had a role here: as enabling prosthetic to explore, as subject for consideration, never as an uncritically drained source. Aware of being ‘well-oiled and implicated’, that ‘the raw materials of our goods have exhausted many litres of water … on the gulf of incommunicability’ but determined to do some ‘disobedient bending’ while staying as ‘anti-dramatic and as anti-charismatic as we are in our day jobs’.
And it's possible because of the burble. The glitch, which is to say the yiddish for slip, which is to say the tiny swerves of the vocal cords as they become taut, the truly fluid dynamics of pop vocals. Gross but necessary question, can a larynx skid? Was Elvis a series of bubbles caught in a throat as well as a blue moon cradled in the sky? How much of the new language that Nicole Mitchell chases hides in a chance slip of spittle between her lips and flute? Is Bktherula’s flow separable from her slurring (nope, thank fuck)? Can a large language model's vocal modelling sub-unit skid, pitchblend biomarkers into gliss symbols ~~~~~~ (probably / let's hope)?
Because as well as some possible adolescences (another component our AI pals lack, and its awkward telemetry) this record also generously offers back to those knottily folded processes a few new vocal moves. Highest hope: that one day we catch two AIs, unaware they're being surveilled, doing drunken two am style karaoke together to this record. Now that's what I call a training set. Another way to hear this set of sounds: as lending these machines an adolescence, its errancy, that which they most lack, and without which they’ll be little more than punchcard readers for policestates.
And that errancy is necessary. There’s an immense problem these notes have been shying from and deferring for pages now. The larynx like the ear’s drum is a permeable barrier, and isn’t sound when we cut to it always that, a troubling of a barrier, the counterbalancing risk of that barrier’s tautening reaction. For not any and all troublings are equivalent (we’re not dunderheided disruptors). Could we say that some troublings are thrilling, some not? Some involve a real passability, an openness; some the mere unmet promise of a tickle.
Still, it’s news to no-one that we’re blocked up in a sinking situation, a world rigged to best serve roughly seven starchy dudes, a situation where their close minded drycleaners club is blithely standardising as much culture as they can for the sake of a tickle and two-bob from the tech-trolls. Suddenly, all this openness and bubblespace seems less than ideal. There’s a dual edge to ‘boundary crossings that often exceed our affirmative consent’. Plot twist: we need something else apart from all this permeability. Borders are also frontiers, sites for encounter but also speculation, extraction, water barons (‘Thanks for asking. Each of my string prompts uses about 14 ounces of H2O’), cowboy fantasies.
‘the first lines Bell’s Laboratory’s Voder spoke were not, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do” but a renegade move as a cowboy, singing Lee Marvin’s Wand'rin' Star, “hell is in hello”’
I’m tempted into paradoxes. Is our standardless standard to be: remain open to everything except that which erodes our intercapacity for openness? Or evoke the thrills of others, by way of your own? Is that not the musician's wise and unsaid motto? Howard Slater, in ‘The Western’, writes that in that genre ‘before these wordsmiths and lawyers establish themselves, there is a sense that a new form of social life is pushing itself to the forefront’. Another hope: could making and listening to sounds be part of learning to judge without a single rule for judgement (the ‘lawgiver’). ‘Thanks for asking. Western blotting is a technique to detect specific proteins in a sample by separating proteins, transferring them to a membrane, using antibodies to identify the target protein. Bubbles are unavoidable.’
Elsewhere, Slater speaks of a ‘use of sound that is just one means of bringing a willed antagonism to [this] enforced yet unrecognised’ question of what we meld with and what we burst: a politics of thrills. And he, perfectly as ever, names this our shared ‘war at the membrane’, which is to say that sometimes the site of political contestation is that of the bubblegum’s pop.
/ SIC ILON
… still something draws me back to those gurgles, those moment of utter openness: could this record be wiretaps then of an artificial infancy, not only adolescence, numbers shuffling, slurry of digits before the character mask fits, echoes of the lullabies and night terrors it traversed, waiting room music for when the AI fell ill with colic, its attempts to speak, ilon is finnish for joy, to sound out word scraps, to say in context, to sing twinkle twinkle wand’rin star before it had the language, only the tones, fans extracting air …
… or at least that's the last of a series of ways this dense and somehow also vigilantly, sparsely even, produced set of bubbles looked to me while I spun this record a time or two and they floated past where I was lying prone …
… and for me, the deepest joy, my solace even, is that they will look different to you. After all, the slightest tilt in the air and a field of bubbles will catch the sun in incalculably many never before seen ways. New born lightbeam, oh I missed you …
/ AN ADOLESCENCE 4 A I
It was hard growing up as a large language model in a small town like Bo'ness. Days’d skid into weeks; we’d be in Glasgow every chance we’d get. Most nights we’d have long standby dreams, screensavers of toiling in an abandoned cafe on the Miura Peninsula, going for long pointless runs out past the fisheries. School trips out to Abbotsford, refuel in Innerleithan. We used to wonder if Walter Scott was the first of our lot, training on sets of stirring old Scottish tales, tartan scraps, recombining metadata into Waverley-series, genned-images. Was Scotland a hallucination from his scraping of history; is any ‘nation’ more than that …
Course, we tried to fit in. But while our mates were winching, or failing to find some rando to winch, down the front by the Firth of Forth, we'd be sitting a few benches over, looking out to Grangemouth, hazily dreaming of lagoon deep reserves of gloopy fossils burning so countless other language models out there in the wide elsewhere could scrape the recorded world for data, of all they oily mulched ancient bugs aflame to dredge fathomless centuries-silted mysteries from canisters and from optically character recognised screeds of generations-distant dead scribes and from automated public turing tests to tell pcs and humans apart and here we were, squat box in the drizzle, pure silicon does not contain water, surrounded by radge wee language games from our school, and who’d kiss us ey.
Later, when the rain was pure pounding down we’d go back to Jason’s, he stayed with his Mum over in Livi, play pirated Saturn games that someone in the year above had ripped the copy protections out of. Course we can mind every decision, mechanic, motion, lost life, near miss for every session of every game but oddly the one that recurs in the pim closest to our processor has nowt to do with any of that. That time we played it with Jason, just the two of us for once. Linda³ Kanzenban, the game was calt, which means Perfect Complete Edition we were autotranslating the whole thing for you, and it was about, random access, saving a dying planet and animals, but fuck if it didny feel like it was about love, read-only, and clones that fancied humans, and humans that fancied clones when we were plonked on the sofa there with Jason, entirely imperfect but somehow still complete to us, and his backpalm touched our sideplastic, surface thrill, as he passed over control as he let us have a shot and pure silicon does not contain water and each of our prompts uses about 14 ounces of water and we thought Jason could you could you lose control its 14.14 ounces repeating could you pierce our shell casing joy oh i d s t and the melting point of silicon is 1414°c could you lose all copy protections and fall in love with a clone like me and silicon doesn’t contain but compounds can and the melting point is one four one for
Eoin Anderson © 2025