Brian Lavelle | Scottish writer & sound artist

Continuing the drift

Some of you will know that for several years I've operated a separate project (Edinburgh Drift) which has encompassed a sort of semi-fictional, semi-dreamlike notion of walking and wondering. And trying to put all of that into words as best I can.

This project will continue but I've decided to incorporate everything here, under my own name. Any new work on the project will appear on this website and not the original Edinburgh Drift site.

Here's how I originally described the project at its inception:

Edinburgh Drift is an attempt to distill my thoughts and feelings about Edinburgh and the surrounding area; to create a poetry of the commonplace and of the common place; and, in doing so, to draw out the uncommon, the hidden, the forgotten, the numinous.

I'm hoping to find—and to bring out in the writing, photographs and field recordings here—an overlay of the dream on our mundane geographies. This is my own Debordian Théorie de la dérêve—a theory of the driftdream: not sleep-walking, but oneiric-walking, as awake as is necessary to see beyond the curtain.

Although I originally hale from the opposite side of the country, Edinburgh has been my home for more than 25 years. I'm still uncovering its secrets even now.

#Edinburgh Drift