Memorex Mori by Conflux Coldwell

"On Memorex Mori, Leeds based musician and academic Dr Mick Schofield aka Conflux Coldwell approaches tape as a different type of keepsake, its built-in decline less a reminder of death's finality than an analogy for memory's slow decay and a means to question the truth of recollection... magnetic crackle as sepia sunshine, glitching tape squall standing in for the daydream-like skipping of details... Tardis telemetry or a sliver of some long-defunct regional television ident... Schofield's pieces subvert the fabric of the VHS medium to illustrate its eeriness"
The Wire review 479/480

"Tapping into poignant themes of degrading memories and decaying objects, these moments are inevitably freighted with haunted disconnectedness. Tape hiss and inchoate rhythms obfuscate any clarity on Lost Work, while muted industrial pulses, warped unplaceable samples and a stalking sequencer pattern on Helical Scan mark a highlight of Coldwell's upcylced imagination" Electronic Sound

"as we grapple with AI, deep fakes, and music industry plants, we have come to return to the question of authenticity as something which should perhaps be valued… Memorex Mori is an unusually authentic work… a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, multi-media project, where past, present, and future collide, and postmodernism melts into the as-yet-to-be-defined present… regardless of individual interpretation, the vast ambition of Memorex Mori is matched by its accomplishment. THIS is a document. A powerful work, which will stay with you long after the silence descends.”
Christopher Nosnibor, Aural Aggravation
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Captivating soundtrack to Michael C Coldwell's film "Memorex Mori" (private view link included as PDF bonus item)
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Last year I found a dusty box of old unlabelled VHS tapes at my parent’s house, including some early work of my own I’d long forgotten about. Unfortunately the tapes were all in very poor condition and I only managed to recover some of the material. Despite the bad quality I decided to sample the videos anyway and make something new out of the various noisy remnants - the final result of that extended process is Memorex Mori.

This project continues a lineage started by William Basinski and The Caretaker, exploring themes of memory loss, entropy and spectrality, through the sampling of destroyed recordings. But Memorex Mori extends this idea into the visual realm, presenting a feature-length music video alongside the music. As well as sampling early Conflux works from tape (Traveller, Glitch, Machinedance and Trainboy) various other unknown recordings were appropriated from the video box - all sorts of forgotten cultural detritus including my Mum’s 30 year old Open University programmes. A few modest pieces of equipment were used to add extra sonic layers - including the Korg NTS-1 and a home-made Marantz tape delay - then all bounced back to VHS.

VHS was the medium of my childhood in the 80s and 90s, and was still routinely used for budget productions by the time I started making films and music of my own. Looking through the old tapes made me realise the ultimate fragility of all our recordings and the memories they hold. These analogue tapes only have an estimated lifespan of 25 years, and this artificial life is only granted to the videos we actually decide to keep. The vast majority ended up in landfill when the world went digital - what was lost in the waste? In contrast, we might think that current digitisation and cloud storage allows our memories to live forever, but they are still fallible. The major difference is that with digital archives this mortality is hidden - with analogue media we can potentially witness that death happening in slow motion before our eyes.

Like a technological work of vanitas, this visible decay allows us to contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of the things we hold dear. Other related themes and questions are raised by such zombie media, to do with legacy and transience. What will we leave behind for the future? What happens when there is nothing left to leave? What if this random selection of decaying tapes were the last evidence of life on Earth – a sort of Noah’s archive on recovered video tape.

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“Memorex is the “ghost kitchen” of consumer goods, a brand that basically lives as a brand, and can be used to sell a few products because you’ll vaguely remember that it used to be worth something.”

https://tedium.co/2021/09/03/memorex-tape-history/amp

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Memorex Mori features alongside Conflux Coldwell’s Zoetrope.space project in Dr. Mick Schofield’s latest writing on hauntology and the role of obsolete media and the technological uncanny. His chapter for Horrifying Children is due to be published by Bloomsbury in early 2024.

Michael "Conflux" Coldwell is a musician and artist from Leeds UK.

He is part of the Urban Exploration collective and works at the University of Leeds, where he conducts research into the hauntology of media.

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