When Things That Happen, Don’t.

I took a day-trip to London to see Wood and Harrison’s Things That Happen at the Carroll / Fletcher Gallery and hear Graham Dunning’s talk at SoundFjord.
It rained and my navigation skills proved themselves to be suspect once more. But I was justly rewarded for my endurance.
Having had the immense pleasure of teaching with Mr. Harrison at Wolverhampton University, I have some knowledge of the video works that Wood and Harrison have created over the years. Things That Happen brings together, new pieces (I have never seen), alongside earlier works, which I have only seen on old, defunct televisions in various badly lit seminar rooms. The show is an eloquently curated retrospective, presented within an appropriately minimalist space: Carroll / Fletcher is a beautiful gallery with a very satisfying gray concrete staircase.

At the back of the gallery a familiar black dot provided me with a mnemonic focal point. I have watched the video Blind/Spot on DVD many times. In my mind I had imagined it to be exhibited full size at the end of a gray minimalist corridor.  I find it however, unassumingly projected onto a free-standing projection screen, similar to those once set up in schools and homes throughout the 1970’s, enabling us to watch educational films on childbirth, and Super 8 films of holidays in Rhyl or unprofessional family pets. Of course, this is the perfect situation for the work: a screen upon a screen: a projected space upon a space for projection. The video holds a black dot in the middle of a white rectangle, before abruptly snapping up to reveal another black dot on the white rectangle of another screen, which snaps up again to reveal another dot on another screen further down a corridor of other screens. The dot remains the same size, although in fact it is increasing in size as it recedes down the corridor: the circle filling a larger area of the rectangle in order to remain unchanged to the eye. This simple experiment seems to rent a hole in my perception of the space I am seeing: a visual diagram undermining my frail understanding of the laws of physics. The tear is accompanied by the audible snap of the screen rolling up, however, the sound is not dramatically amplified, but carefully left to descend from the tinny speaker of the projector above our heads.

Next to Blind/Spot, in the corner of the gallery, a TV monitor sits abandoned on the floor. In front of this hang a pair of headphones, quietly awaiting the unification of sound and image. On the TV screen a microphone swings from side to side in front of a small amp. I am of course reminded of Reich’s Pendulum Music, to whom Wood and Harrison offer their ‘Apologies’, but here there are no performers and the repetitive un-touched initiation and cessation of movement, adds futility to the dull tock of the looped swing. The visually mute chronometric pendulum of MIC/Amp remains silent until I put on the headphones. At this moment an intermittent feedback, swings through my ears, slowly approaching an exquisite full stop, in the form of a constant standing tone humming intimately, right between my eyes. Wood and Harrison’s use of sound is adroit and understated, the work Shelf   (2007) ( (not in this show) is in many ways as much a sound piece as it is a video installation.

In 10 x 10 (2011) a cyclical almost autonomic gush of breath, reminiscent of a David Lynch soundtrack, seems to repeatedly drag down image after image projected onto a large wall.  The regular rhythm of this noise implies continuity, a mechanical descent, which distances us from the space we are observing.  The closed-circuit of these images provides a voyeuristic glimpse into the windowless rooms of a bizarre office block, inhabited occasionally by a bored man (Harrison) whose behavior seems simultaneously mundane and bizarre: throwing paper planes into a bin; blowing up balloons, which never increase in size; dropping office furniture onto randomly arranged strip lights. The monotonous descent of images proceeds like a visual paternoster, allowing us to join or leave the threads of narrative that a full ride reveals.   Sometimes Harrison appears adorned in a line-up of fancy dress costumes, which reminds me of Village People: a police officer, a cowboy, a Red Indian (sadly no macho man). Harrison seems to be waiting for an office party that no one else could be bothered to attend. The dull dejection of such overdue moments pervades many of the works that make up Things That happen. The actions performed seem to result from a lack of purpose, time suspended in that idle never ending empty moment when things that happen, don’t.

Soliloquy #3: sebastiane hegarty (2008)

Later that afternoon I clumsily orienteered through increasingly unfamiliar regions of Tottenham, in search of SoundFjord, where Graham Dunning was giving a fascinating talk as part of his exhibition For Posterity. The talk concerned his attempt to reunite a found reel-to-reel tape with the owners of the voices left upon it.

At a car boot sale, Graham had bought a flat-bed tape recorder together with a spool of audio tape. Upon this he found waiting the voices of a family who had recorded themselves ‘for posterity’: for the listening attention of unknown ears. Diligently Graham had located the survivors of these voices and corresponded to discuss a safe return. But the narrative had continued whilst voice remained still: one of the children heard singing had died in a motorbike accident and his father had also died some years after the tape had been recorded. The surviving relative of the voices could not bear to hear them speak: to have them happen again.  She did not want them returned, but preferred them left where they were: unspoken and unheard.

Found tapes have featured in my own sound work and I have boxes full of discarded voices that others have left to disintegrate on forgotten audiocassettes, reel to reels and answerphone tapes. There is something fatal in the act of recording voice.  Edison of course, considered the phonograph a portal for conversations with the deceased, whilst, in Ulysses, James Joyce imagined a gramophone would one day be placed in the headstones of all our dearly departed.
Having made numerous covert recordings of people talking on trains or in the delayed spaces of transport waiting rooms, I am aware of the fatality that occurs when we attempt to keep that which is fleeting. When listening back to these voices whilst still in the present company of their author, I was struck by a dull but absolute sense of loss. The layering of the past upon the present generated a distinct lack in time, a lack that made ghosts of those whose voice I had confiscated.

Yeast Lab: the sound of microbes & magnetic fleas

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.

one of ten: unpredicted duets and the company of rivers

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.

three landscapes and a river: a graphic score

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.

Frieze: Carsten Nicolai and the John Cage Variations

Went to Frieze on Friday and managed to find Carsten Nicolai at G7 (Galerie Eigen). Really liked the prints from his Grid Index and the glass stacks with random dots. Aptly, when I took a picture of the stacks you could see the grid of the Frieze tent reflected in the glass; strangely when I used the camera on my iPhone the ceiling fans slowed down as did the reflections of people passing.
I was tempted to buy one of the prints a snip at £800 Euro’s. Common sense overcame me and I departed Frieze with a DVD of John Cage Variations Vll as compensation. I also had a glimpse of Michael Stipe, who was looking ever so elegantly shy.

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).

Interval for two

I’m currently working on soundscapes for the opening event of 10 Days Across the City festival, at the Royal Theatre, Winchester. I had a tour of backstage and even better, understage: this is the view from the orchestra pit. Spatz (the theatre’s chief technician) lowered all the stays that normally suspend lights and scenery over the stage and I attached contact microphones and ‘played’ them by rattling them and setting up gentle swinging patterns.  I used the sounds captured to create a short metallic interval that will interrupt the two soundscapes broadcast into the auditorium on the evening of Halloween.