INSIDE A GLEAMING FEELING by Craig Pollard

A collection of conference papers, lectures and excerpts on music, art making and the internet by Newcastle based practitioner Craig Pollard.

Inside a Gleaming Feeling is a slender collection of texts commodious in scope, constantly inhabiting the paradoxes and contradictions at which it points its compass, or - in the case of the metamodernist metaphor cited in the chapter for a while now, I’ve at least had a sense that whatever it is I am living is not something that is entirely resolved by the usual categories I have inherited - the pendulum oscillating between “innumerable poles”. Not with an exhausted drag from one portal, gate, debate, stage, screen or field to the next, but a delicate gathering force in dialogue with the present and its permutations. The texts gathered here enact an intersectional feminist praxis, a commitment to show all sides of this potent dodecahedron called ~culture. Craig’s is a goal not of placing this apart from that in binaried opposition, but tracing the threads and their interlopers, the ways in which they fold, crack and foreground “fissures of possibility”. Read its title Inside a Gleaming Feeling as its “feeling structure”, a phrase which by the author’s own confession made its first attempt at utterance as a line which never made it into a song, could not be smoothly patterned in, but poses a fitting fly poster to read this book with. To gleam is to “shine brightly, especially with reflected light” and so the question leans: how is it even possible to be inside a reflection, fleeting brief and shiny? This contradictive something at the tip of the tongue is the positive inarticulation of the hook or the hashtag, bobbing its head to the rhythm of “paradox as constitutive to contemporary experience.”

Craig Pollard is a music maker and artist based in Newcastle, UK. He is also an academic and part time lecturer, having completed a practice-led PhD about the politics of contemporary music making and creative practice in 2018. He makes music and performs under the name Competition and intermittently hosts music and art events as one half of Wild Pop.