LOWLINES: THE NEWSLETTER !
Lowlines: Liner Notes #1 - place, resonance⚡, swamplands, edgelands, free parties and scooping an award. Let's go!
Hello!
Welcome to the first batch of Liner Notes, so glad you’ve joined this list and have ventured to click in! I’m going to use this to share news, threads and ideas that emerge through my pursuit of all things low. A Substack scrapbook, if you will. A smorgasbord of low-ness.
Ok, first off, some housekeeping ; )
WHO IS THIS?
I’m Petra, host and creator of the Lowlines podcast. I like pounding pavements, talking to strangers and sinking into PLACE. I made a career of it, as a street food trader, then through starting and running KERB. I’m on the fringes of the business now and so have more time to forage for stories about how different places make us feel and behave. I like to tune in, talk to people, follow the threads and connect the dots. This is how I got into creating Lowlines - through this gravitational pull to move down from my ‘distracted and pranged out head’, plant my feet on the ground and get lower.
WHAT D’YOU MEAN, ‘GET LOWER’?
Literally, and in all ways possible, dropping down from a life lived disproportionately up in the head. Venturing to challenge the Western/European over-reliance on the rational, the logical, the intellectual, the endlessly busy, and feel into what the body knows. What the land knows - because this sh*t is tantric, yall.
I want to explore this more because I believe connection to our bodies and our inherent resonance with place have been abandoned to a culture/system that encourages our disconnection/distraction from who we are and where we are.
Staying up here 🔼 all the time, I believe, is leading us to less connection with the world, not more. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has us pursuing an individuated ascension as the route to self-actualisation… but what if we flip the signal and explore decension 🔽 and getting lower as a way of rebalancing and feeling more tuned in?
There are a million ways to get low: walking, climbing a tree barefoot, twerking, getting out to the marshes, putting on some Tara Brach, standing in front of a big bass bin and letting the sound ⚡expand ⚡your ⚡whole ⚡body, eating Rose Delights and lying on the grass… even in the awareness that getting lower opens up deeply felt pathways (that our rational brains alone could never) is a gift and a move towards more powerful resonance.
I’m feeling my way down into all of this and starting to share it as I go, an amateur seeking to return to herself. Like I said, it’s tantric - it feels full, and vibratory and a total antidote to the tyranny of the perpetual climb upwards.
BUZZING UP MY LOWLINES LATELY:
PLACES
New Orleans: I returned to New Orleans in April for a couple of weeks and damn it felt good. My whole brain chemistry changed as my body fell into that swampy style of ‘molecular rearrangement’ that comes from being in this most low down of all places:
“Here’s to the low end. To the players of bass violins and bass guitars, tubas and sousaphones, and foghorns, too. And to that music, built around the bass lines of New Orleans, whose name - funk - is perhaps derived from its Kongo slaves’ word for ‘strong body odor’, lufuki, and whose tones evince all that emerges, mucky and sweet, from the mud that makes this place be” Solnit and Snedeker, Unfathomable City
Essence Magazine just paid tribute to the ‘people, places and spaces of the Big Easy’ with a love letter penned by one of my absolute favourites, Stevona Elem-Rogers, and photographed by golden-eyed dynamo Edward Buckles. If you listened to Ep 01 of Lowlines and dug it, read this for fierce love and reverence for the city that pulls so deep you’ve got no choice but to get low.
Listen to my interview with Jarrad Degruy (now Keyshia-Pearl)
Canvey Island: I read in a piece by John Little in Superstore Wilderness - Explorations and Adventures in our Edgelands that Canvey Wick, an old brownfield site on Canvey Island, has more biodiversity per square foot than anywhere else in the UK (“The complexity and chaos of these spaces make them incredible for nature”). And that it’s below sea level and has this rich music scene… so this has to be a shoe-in for the next series of Lowlines. I hopped in the car and drove down there last week. Lowlines all over the place - lots of interesting strangers befriended and stories shared. More on this soon.
THINGS
“People talk about mindfulness but I want an embodied life, in which the self sits in the soft inside of an elbow, or in our muscles, not just in our brains. We can access the brain through the body, and our bodies contain ideas and experience.” Emma Warren
Emma Warren has penned an incredible, juicy tour de force on the profound human compulsion and need to MOVE the body - and a raging love letter to so many glorious ways this has been made space for in the UK… and more recently, eroded away.
Speaking of which…
Dance Your way Home is a great accompaniment to this wonderful, yet enraging documentary about the convergence of the rave and trav scenes on common land across the UK in the late 80s/early 90s. Radical, underground, truly collaborative - the final death gasp of the peasant revolts after being kicked off the land in the enclosures (or is it?) Wild, untethered, un-toned-down England 😍 - must watch.
The Emerald podcast: On Resonance: Caves, Hooves, Hearts, Harps…and the birth of Culture
“The primary opening of the human being to the world is not logical but musical” Giorgio Agamben
I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve sent this to. Probably a good chunk of this fledgling subscriber list ; ) but this thing is so GOOD. Seismic, I’d say. I mean, of course the cave men were using the caves not just to light fires in and draw on - they were whole-ass, reverberating instruments of the land. Damn. Creator Josh Schrei is a trip.
And finally… LOWLINES WON AN AWARD LAST WEEK!
Lowlines was shortlisted for two IWPAs and we scooped the win for Behind the Scenes Brilliance. Incredible result for our indie lil show! Massive props to producer duo Lucia Scazzocchio and Lina Prestwood for this, and for being prepared to dive so deep into the world of Lowlines. So wonderful that your brilliance has been recognised 💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽
Thanks for reading. I’m just feeling my way into putting this out there so bear with me - it will get more cinched ; )
And if you’re picking up what I’m putting down on all this then I wanna hear about it! What has been ⚡buzzing up your lowlines⚡ lately? Leave a comment or send me a message.
I’m off to find a geomancer this week, will update soon ; )
Petra 💫
Lowlines is out on Apple here (currently enjoying a ride in the US New and Noteworthy section) and Spotify here, as well as all the other platforms - including the Lowlines website
Whooooop! Oh Petra I am soooo happy you’re here speaking all the kind of speak I want to hear! xxxxxxxxx
💕💕💕