Xerographic score #1: full image and two details

The Xerox machine or photocopier,  is one of my most favoured drawing instruments. If time, and credit permit, I take full advantage of its ability to, replicate, generate and damage visual information. The dry (xeros) writing (graphia) process of electrophotography is of course intended to reproduce: to copy and duplicate quickly. However, the copying process introduces its own artifacts, through the mechanical and chemical degeneration of information, scratches and dirt on the glass plate, and banding streaks of diminishing ink. Such inherent loss has the potential to transform a copy into an original copy, which is both unique and singular. The forensic study of such blemishes of reproduction can actually be used to identify specific brands and models of photocopier. Such unintentional errors constitute a form of steganography or concealed writing, inscribing a hidden message, available only to those who know it is there: visual notes that only some can read

It would perhaps then seem appropriate to use Xerography as a method of creating or rather, [re] producing a graphic score. The reproduction process feels distinctly hand rendered: the touched weight and texture of each sheet of paper, the gestures of hands choreographed by the feeding and retrieving procedure. Although immediate, there is a hesitant, analogue delay, as the photo-chemically scored ‘copy’ arrives concealed, face down and late. The optional manual feed allows for the use of different (‘thick’) papers and the reorientation, repetition and layering of inscription. For me the actual labour of making the copies regenerates memories of etching and the traditional printing process.

Xerographic score #2
Xerographic score #4
Xerographic score #3 detail

The xerographic scores are not made in response to sounds, like some of my other graphic scores (for example, the (mono)printed, ‘drawn’ & copied score for Yvon Bonenfant’s Masz project (see below) made in response to Diamanda Galas’s Plague Mass, or the traced, Letraset score for three landscapes and a river, made in response to my own soundscapes). The copier scores are intended as a method of making sounds yet unheard, available to hearing. They offer poetic, visual organisations of sound, open to the error of reproduction and indeterminate of any prescribed sonic response.

‘My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard. I don’t hear the music I write, I write in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard’ (John Cage).

Theresa Sauer’s excellent book Notations 21, explores the graphic scores of composers such as Cage, Earl Brown and R. Murray Schafer, allowing an insight into the compositional strategies of the musically adept. As a non-musician, who cannot read musical notation, the graphic score allows for a dialogue with sound in which visual and aural information enter into correspondence. The dry writings of the Xerographic scores, offer an opportunity for not only the interpretation and organisation of yet sounds yet unheard, but also an appeal to the ‘unstruck sounds’ (Schafer) available to the imagination. Might they also allow the eye to adopt the perceptual inclination of the ear? The eye, so concerned with isolating information and bringing the indistinct into solid focus, may become draw into the unlimited rhythms of attention and hesitation, more normally allied with listening: allowing the visual to take on the perceptual ‘condition of music’ (Walter Pater).

Graphic score for Yvon Bonenfant’s Masz project (detail)

Last week I had a wonderful day with Simon Park, recording the sounds of the microbiological laboratory at Surrey University. Simon, an expert in microbiological luminescence, had very kindly set up a number of cultures: a conical jar of yeast and two petri dishes of other luminescent microbe colonies. The cultures are kept in a series of incubator rooms set to different temperatures in order to aid the growth of microbes. The room set to human body temperature is breathtakingly warm; I had no idea that I was this hot.

This initial visit to the lab was a kind of acoustic reconnaissance: lets listen to what is there to hear. Simon showed me the various machines used to stir and agitate the liquid cultures. This includes the ‘Magnetic Flea’, a seemingly uninteresting, elongated plastic covered magnet, visually not unlike a suppository. However, when the flea is put into a jar placed on a spinning machine, it begins an untidy clangorous choreography, as it rattles against the glass walls of its container. Finding equilibrium, it produces a distinct pattern of movement and sound, each magnet composing its own percussive stir: unique to that jar, that flea, in that moment and that position. The patterns continually evolve and change like listening to waves fall onto the shore, a sonic equivalent to the visual patterns of growth produced by the microbes in the petri dish.

We spent hours (and I do mean hours) trying different jars, different fleas, different microphones, and different spinners. Some of the machines allow the speed of stir to be varied, so that the jars can be ‘played’ like a musical instrument. And whilst some machines spin to stir, others have a gentler shaking action, like the clichéd motion supposedly used to swill brandy around the bottom of a glass.  I recorded many variations of instruments, jars and microphones to capture a canon of growing percussive patterns.

In one of the incubator rooms I placed contact microphones against the sides of a conical jar containing yeast. On the surface of the solution you could see small eruptions of gas as the yeast feeds, digests and expels. In appearance it is not unlike looking through a telescope at the surface of some gaseous planet. It is interesting that visually we often find the microscopic and macroscopic interchangeable: so what would be the audio equivalent? I suppose the contact microphone may be seen as a form of aural microscope: delving beneath the surface to listen to the very substance of things, bringing the tiniest sound closer and making it available to the ear.

Through the glass membrane of the conical jar, the snap, crackle and pop of yeast digestion is audible, although the contact microphone also picks up the vibration of the incubators heating system  travelling through the metal shelving system. This metallic hum adds a laboratorial ambience to the sound here, (I have reduced it slightly in post-production, so as to emphasise the sound of yeast). The drone of environmental climate control could perhaps be called the ‘keytone’ sound of the laboratory (and of the archive; a soundscape I have also explored). R Murray Schafer described a Keynote sound as ‘often not consciously perceived’ but ‘heard continuously or frequently enough to form a background against which other sounds are perceived.’ In the laboratory the hum of temperature control pronounces an acoustic stasis, the pulsing sound of time standing still.

A hydrophone sunk into the solution, is surrounded by the digestion of yeast, although again the ambient sound of the laboratory is also present in the mix: this time it’s the voices of people preparing to experiment. In order to get a larger hydrophone in on the action, we decant the yeast to a metal pan and notice (through the microscope of contact microphones) a change in the acoustics resulting from the metal skin of the pan. Another experiment, set-up quickly by Simon, involved two conical jars and a rubber tube. By gently stirring one jar full of yeast, the gas escapes up the tube into a jar full of water, producing quite delicious bubbles of effluent.

The yeast songs have their own pattern, as the microbes consume all available oxygen and food, the static crackle of their existence is extinguished. There is the possibility of producing a spatial and acoustic bell curve, through which could be heard the life cycle of these microbes, their multiplication, peak and extinction: a microbiological soundscape, beginning with silence and returning to it.

A Journey up to London to see Gerhard Richter at the Tate and Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy. I had forgotten that Tacita Dean’s piece Film, was the latest Installation for The Turbine Hall, and as such I was unprepared for the dark shadow that the installation casts into the hall. As you walk into the building you are met by a distinct lack of light, Film’s distant gloaming summoning you down, deeper into the darkness. Like the secular light of an avant-garde Cathedral window the strip of enlarged Film hangs in the night which lurks at the end of the Turbine Hall.

As I watched the eleven-minute loop, looping, I felt myself succumb to its soporific lull, staring through the images into my own thinking. The echo of intermittent footsteps as people approached and moved away became a soundtrack assisting my drift. Although slightly disturbed by the stationary sprockets, which add a frame of pretense to the reality of the film, I sat here silently watching time passing me by: ‘waiting without waiting for’.

I must confess that I am partial to watching nothing happen, especially when it doesn’t happen very slowly. In 2001 Dean’s show at Tate Britain allowed me to sit on the melancholic carousal of Berlin’s Fernsehturm television tower: I sat there for several rotations, listening to the ticking chronometer of the 16mm projector with occasional accompaniment from the man on the Fernsehturm’s organ (this all does sound unintentionally seaside).

The grey melancholy of Gerhard Richter’s Baader Meinhof room added to the gloomy pall falling over the day (in an act of unintentional irony, every room in the Richter exhibition had  a sign saying Photography is strictly forbidden) . At the RA’s Building the Revolution I discovered Gustav Klutsis’s Design for Loudspeaker No. 7 and the sublime squares, lines and circles of Rodchenko, Malevich, and Lisitsky (forms also found in Tacita Dean’s Film). But even these transcendent ‘archetonics’ had a shadow cast over them, when seen in the photographic company of the architecture they inspired. Beautiful forms, flowing with function, left to crumble and rot; one of the remaining ‘palaces’ now with its insides ripped out as it was transformed into the foyer of a bank.

Today I found comfort in the discovery of Arthur Zajonc’s book Catching the Light, which was waiting for me on the Oxfam shelf. A ‘multi-levelled history’ of light, the first few pages reveal light itself to be darkness. Zajonc conducted an experiment in which he created a ‘region of space’ (a box) filled only with light: a space in which ‘light does not illuminate any interior objects or surfaces’. What does he see when he looks into light alone: “Absolute darkness! I see nothing but the blackness of empty space […] The space is clearly not empty but filled with light. Yet without an object on which the light can fall, one sees only darkness.’ Following a discussion with the Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Zajonc realised that even the outer space in which our planet floats, the darkness of light is omnipotent: ‘The sun’s light, although present everywhere, fell on nothing and so nothing was seen. Only darkness.’

I see a darkness indeed.

On the 31^st October, artists, musicians, dancers, writers and other creatively inclined individuals and groups from the Winchester district occupied the stage and architecture of the Royal Theatre, Winchester. Unlike the worldwide occupy movement, this occupation was curated by Trisha Bould at the invitation of the theatre and was part of an opening event for the Ten Days Across the City, arts festival. Beginning at six and ending at the stroke of midnight, Map, Plot, Plunder and Possession led its audience behind the scenes of the theatre, into the normally concealed backstage areas of the building.
As part of the event, I composed a cycle of three soundscapes for the auditorium and a sonic river for the public address system. The cycle included soundscapes from the winnall moors sound walk project and Winchester Cathedral, that had been specifically re-composed for the site of the auditorium. In between the two soundscapes, I inserted a percussive interval created by evoking sounds from the lighting and scenery rig of the stage; swinging the descended rigging and occasionally hitting it with a toy xylophone mallet.
The soundscapes were intended to inhabit the acoustics of the theatre and act as a consistent cycle of sound spaces that would come into contact with other acoustic events taking place during the evening. This included; a rehearsal of a song by the Winchester Community Choir from the theatre circle; and the indeterminate composition Copy Rite by Hossein Hadisi and other members of ACE (Avant-garde Composer’s Ensemble).
The choir began their rehearsal in the percussive Interval, before being acoustically repositioned into the soundscape of Winchester Cathedral, the opening of the Cathedral gates, the organist at practice. Perhaps most pleasurable was the choreographed pile up of rehearsal as the community choir’s preparations collided with the Pilgrim school rehearsing in the Cathedral.
In Copy Rite, Hossein Hadisi and the other members of ACE (Sam Cave/Guitar; Tom Green/Piano & Ignacio Agrimbau/Gyil & Hulusi) moved around the theatre between pre-arranged sites within and without the auditorium: a piano in a stairwell, a guitar on the first floor of the atrium. The sounds of the auditorium were fed back into these satellite positions, all the musicians responding to the sounds, acoustics and other visual events occurring around them. Both the choir and Copy-Rite, created some rather unrehearsed collisions with the continuous cycle of soundscapes.

The peripatetic music of ACE, mingled not only with its disparate musical parts, but also the acoustics of the theatre and the patterns and dynamics of the entire recorded and existing soundscape. The sonic river, composed entirely from the sounds of water from winnall moors, leaked, flowed and dripped into the acoustics of the architecture. In the front of house speakers the water generated small wet, but distinct pockets of sound. In the non-space of the corridors the speakers created a ventriloquial soundscape, the echoic drips evading location. In the atrium, the dripping of water echoed the pluck of guitar strings, the river seeming to rain down from the heavens, although the speakers were actually located. A fragment from this unpredicted duet appears on the winnall moors sound walk blog, along with a section of the unaccompanied sonic river.
All photographs by kind permission of David Gibbons.

‘Serendipity: making discoveries by accident and sagacity, of things we are not in quest of’.

After discovering a large amount of flies dying or approaching death at the Frieze Art Fair, I had not given their demise another thought. But on Friday, I rolled open a blind in a room at work (appropriately numbered 101) and there discovered a quiet holocaust: a windowsill landscape of dead flies. Most of the flies were dead on their backs, but others seemed to have just fallen over, whilst one was in a strangely erect position, as if addressing the other members of the necropolis. There was definitely something of the Pompeii in the flies’ deathly arrangement. One fly occasionally moved a leg, whilst the remaining extant fly, wandered around on a sky, cruelly visible through the glass pane of the window.

Exposing a rather Warholian disposition, I went to get my camera, so that I might visually seize the poor flies in their moribund tableaux.
I read a story once that, when Andy was informed one of his ‘friends’ had just leapt from a building to his death, Andy replied, “I wish he had told me, I could have taken my camera and filmed him”. Which may appear heartless and cruel, but then again if the call had been made and Andy and his Bolex arrived, then this sad anonymous exit may have been remembered; a life disappeared, would be framed and possibly immortalised through the 16mm lens of Andy’s ‘ocular vampirism’.
Not that I would claim to be immortalising the brief lives of these poor flies. No, there is just something very sad in the quiet recent death that hides behind the closed blind of a window.

Yesterday I tested three soundscapes for an event at the Theatre Royal Winchester. The event called Map Plot Plunder Possession will form the centerpiece for the 10 Days Across the City art festival.

My three soundscapes are extended versions from the winnall moors sound walk project; Winchester Cathedral; and an abstract ‘interval’ composed from sounds evoked by ‘playing’ the hanging rods of the lighting/screen system. The interval maintains the sequence and rhythm of the original ‘live’ recording, but the sounds have been layered and manipulated slightly, to create three variations on a theme, each interval separating the moors and Cathedral soundscapes. I also composed a sonic river, which will be running through the theatre public address system. The public address system provides a strange form of acousmatics, locating the sound whilst simultaneously suggesting a space beyond the visible.  The system disperses the origin of the sound and creates different architectural pools and tributaries as the sound interacts with the acoustics of the space. The towering atrium space creates an immense reverberation chamber, which again hides the source of the sound, whilst in spite of the speakers actually being located at head height, suggests a waterfall of invisible rain pouring down upon our ears.
As with many of my other sound works I am interested in the problem of drawing from the sounds visually, in the form of a graphic score. As with my score for Yvon Bonenfant, the drawings are not intended to represent the sound as much as conjure up a method of translating sound into visual form, which allow others to reinterpret back into sound. Not being a musician and working with field-recording & phonography, I am using sounds that are not normally notated. However, I am interested in the synaesthetic dialogue between visual and aural material and the handing over of compositional control.
The graphic score for three soundscapes and a river, uses old Letraset and the process of tracing and following the mapped lines of rivers, which run through the moors and around the Cathedral.  The compositional drawing unintentionally mimics the digital waveform pattern of the sounds.
If any musicians would be interested in interpreting these graphic scores, please get in touch.

One fly, photographed prior to exit, sat staring out at the horizon of being, considering existence and if art has a purpose beyond investment and the occasional takeaway from a rotting potatoe.

Some other highlights of Frieze included Ben Rivers (16mm film & shed); Roger Ackling (burning wood with a magnifying glass) & Amalia Pica’s very nice sculpture using string, potatoe & coke bottle  (pic below).

I created a graphic score in response to Plague Mass by Diamanda Galas for Yvon’s Masz project. This was subsequently turned back into voice and sound by Yvon & Will Edmondes. Yvon then made a video for the sound, which used the fragile surfaces of my score as a visual texture. The video has been seleceted for MIX 2011 Queer Experimental Film Festival in New York.

Images from my score are available here.

I first saw Guy Sherwins’ 16mm films when I was a student of his, studying Fine Art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the 1980’s. These were the last days of a liberal, experimental, non-modular, art curriculum: imagine an education without feedback forms or customer (nee student) surveys. The long list of visiting lecturers at Wolverhampton included artists from all disciplines, alongside writers, musicians and simply unclassifiable performance groups. To mention just a few from the impressive cast list that corrupted my formative years: Max Eastley; Ivor Cutler; Jo Spence; Fast Forward; David Critchley; Roger McGough (who marked my dissertation, generously granting it a first).
I consider myself fortunate to study at this time and to subsequently teach alongside Guy (and Paul Harrison of Wood & Harrison) at the University of Wolverhampton. Guy’s films and poetic investigation of time, film and perception, remain a vital influence on the development of my own practice.
The installations at Siobhan Davies Studios continue to question and impress. I was particularly interested in the Staircase projections, which reveal the choreography of stairs whilst disrupting the tacit anticipation of movement: the distinction between previous and present movement becoming less distinct, as people now ascending and descending the staircase make shadowy journeys through a layer of projected space covering the present situation. Such ghostlike presence is reflected in the architecture of the building, the flight of previous stairs remaining as visible scars upon the tiled walls intersecting the new staircase.

Tree Reflection #2 passes a single loop of film through two 16mm projectors: one running forward and one reverse. Guy had engineered a ‘common drive-shaft’ between the two projectors to ensure the speed of both projectors remains constant.
Having seen the film as part of Guy’s Short Film Series, I ashamedly ignored the projectors and stood fixated on the slow reflected progression of a coot moving across the surface of a canal and the simultaneous inverting of the film, which exchanges the landscape and its reflection. The flip, which echoes the visual inversion of eye & brain, occurs at such a slow rate, that it seems to sneak beneath the boundary of visual perception.
Guy watched me whilst I watched the film, when he pointed out that I was ignoring the projectors, I turned around and only then noticed the mirrored second projection on the wall behind me.
Beautiful films that simultaneously soak up my attention and make my head ache with thinking.

You can see one of Guy Sherwin’s films, with links to others and his perfomative collaborations with Lynn Loo here: Man With Mirror

I wrote an essay to accompany Guy’s first DVD Optical Sound Films 1971-2007. This can be bought from Lux, where a biography of Guy and video interview are also available.