About

We believe reality to be the product of interaction between three powerful elements: Octoberness, Perfection and Slapstick. Octoberness is a complexity of emotions associated with the transition from summer into autumn. Those few days of delicious melancholy during which the present assumes the dreamlike intensity of distant memory, moving even the most brutalised among us to poetry; this yearning sensation that comes from watching summer retreat, leaving memories (often apocryphal) of crystalline perfection in it’s wake, abides with us throughout the year and is a fundament of our psyche.

Octoberness is also a sense of pending, of waiting for something to happen. Is it winter or a season of more lasting darkness waiting in the wings? In the corner of our eyes do we detect the shadow of Leviathan? Perfection is that unattainable state of flawlessness that every schoolboy knows does not exist. In Abstercot we believe a flaw to be an imaginary side product of rules created by the human intellect. Take away human perception and suddenly everything is perfect by dint of it’s mere existence. Suddenly everything is of equal value and well worth the intimate scrutiny if artists and ordinary people alike.

Though we must keep our rules to prevent civilisation slipping into entropy and stagnation, to proceed with this notion of perfection firmly embedded in one’s heart affords one a rich sensory life free from the hierarchies of beauty. The third element Slapstick is, like gravity, an inescapable force of nature. It teaches us through comical mishap, embarrassment and enforced clumsiness, valuable and life enhancing lessons in humility. Through the good offices of Slapstick we are delivered from pomposity, conceit and misplaced sobriety. Well, there you have it!