From Hill to Sea: Dispatches from the Fife Psychogeographical Collective

Fife: almost an island. Betwixt and between the cities of Edinburgh and Dundee; an ancient Pictish Kingdom, bounded by the Firths of Forth and Tay. Where a Brutalist New Town is built on a 4,000 year old henge and 18 feet menhirs brood on a ladies golf course, under the shadow of Largo Law.

Ideas crackle, tussle and fizz over this land-formed Scottie dogs head. Kirkcaldy's famous son Adam Smith tossed a large brick into the pool of economic theory with The Wealth of Nations written on a site now housing Greggs the Bakers.
Take a walk with the ghosts through Little Moscow where Lawrence Storione founded the Anarchist Communist League in Cowdenbeath and West Fife elected Willie Gallacher as the first Communist MP in 1935. In Lumphinnans you will find Gagarin Way, a street tagged in honour of the Soviet cosmonaut.

In Methil and East Wemyss, streets and landscapes which inspired painter William Gear, member of CoBrA, the post-war avant-garde movement that fed into the Situationist International. In Rosyth, stumble across industrial relics in unlikely places.

Woven throughout is the presence and wonder of non-human worlds. From archipelagos of imaginary islands to the forms and colours of the wild wood.

From Hill to Sea. Wandering beyond the paths and roads through forest, edgeland, town and city. An expansive psychogeography: the influence of the geographical environment on the human mind in both urban and non-urban contexts. Thin places, worlds within worlds, voids, wild woods and coffin tracks. At the coast, shifting thresholds of sea and sky; land and tidal flows. Walking as being-in-the-world, in the flux and flow of the present moment. Old Heraclitus was right, you never step in the same burn or river twice.

Mapping the interstices of past, present and possible. Assorted rag-pickings collected along the way. Soundtracks, real and imaginary, from Morton Feldman to The Fall.. In Stygian depths, body molecules are rearranged by the shamanic noise rituals of Keiji Haino. On our back, in the dark,in a Paris church, immersed in the Occam Ocean sound world of Éliane Radigue.

Connecting the local to the global and the global to the local: burn, stream, river, estuary, ocean. It's all just a matter of scale. No landscape is ever neutral.
(Accompanying music available to stream throughout)