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*2026 stock* "One way to interpret Vernon’s evocation of Brussels is as a patchwork of interdependent absences. We hear numerous spoken stories, yet none of them in full; details are lost to magnetic erasure, to the truncations of compositional editing, to the recollective limits of fallible minds. A voice hesitates as it recounts an early memory of falling. Another falters into damaged tape as it describes a trip into the forest, words sunken irretrievably under disruptive plosives. Into these gaps, Vernon pours atmospheres that perfectly render sensations of potential and inarticulability: the gurgling of water, the overlapping chatter of public spaces, amorphous suspensions of drone, all of which act like guardians to these tender zones of absent specifics.
One speaker describes their return to a familiar space as like “rewriting on the same page, and sort of erasing what I had lived there, in order to make space for new memories”. It’s therefore perfect that Vernon’s process should centre the manipulation of analogue tape: a medium synonymous with the imperfect overlay of the past upon itself, with the previous contents of overwritten cassettes forever threatening to burst through. After recording residents of Brussels describing their earliest childhood memories, Vernon intentionally distressed the tape and buried it underground for 10 days, placing it alongside magnets that damaged and part-erased the contents.
One speaker describes their return to a familiar space as like “rewriting on the same page, and sort of erasing what I had lived there, in order to make space for new memories”. It’s therefore perfect that Vernon’s process should centre the manipulation of analogue tape: a medium synonymous with the imperfect overlay of the past upon itself, with the previous contents of overwritten cassettes forever threatening to burst through. After recording residents of Brussels describing their earliest childhood memories, Vernon intentionally distressed the tape and buried it underground for 10 days, placing it alongside magnets that damaged and part-erased the contents.
These recordings were then excavated and recombined in a random sequence, with Vernon occasionally “reconstructing” damaged memories by inserting extracts from the higher-fidelity originals. Despite the hands-on nature of this process, the end result feels like a more authentic depiction of the interaction between time and human memory than if Vernon had simply allowed the untampered tape to run. The present is never an immaculate and unbroken “now”, but a nonlinear jostle of immediate sensory experience, overlain recollections and lost histories pressing in at the edges, the words scrawled over themselves until the page starts to give way." - Jack Chuter
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