Conflux Coldwell - Memorex Mori (2023)

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