Withdrawn from use

mo[nu]ment. 2006-8. Sebastiane Hegarty

[Silence]

FIRST VOICE [Very softly] ¹

Shh. Shush. Hush. Schtum. Silence is often something imposed, an instruction to refrain, to not participate, something we leave behind when we hold our tongue and keep mum. It seems appropriate that many of the silencing verbs, which are primarily directed toward a silencing of speech, are onomatopoeic in origin; pre-verbal imitations of sounds that hold voice back from language. Even the physical action of the verbs’ pronunciation requires a narrowing of the mouth, a gesture which in the mumble of closed lips and shushed tittle-tattle of tongue against teeth, mimes the physical restraint of utterance. But the refrain of silence need not be a negative imposition, it might be a positive choice, an elective, collective and possibly selective withdrawal from presence. 

The above paragraph is from, Withdrawn from use: Silence, listening and undoing, a new article published in the latest issue of the journal Organised Sound 26/2 (Cambridge University Press). Edited by the composer, musician and academic, Tullis Rennie the issue explores Socially Engaged Sound Practices. In his editorial Tullis introduces a collection of articles which are: 

‘[…] decidedly diverse: in interpretations of ‘sociality’; and in addressing distinct areas and eras of sound practices – the contemporary, canonical and hereto less-heard. Considering this issue as a single entity, the authors thus become united in their aim to diversify the conversation, in decentralising theoretical approaches to the subject matter and in the positive inclusion of a wider variety of voices, experiences, sounding bodies and attitudes to listening.’

I am delighted to be amongst such a diverse and fascinating collection of articles and authors, which includes Catherine Clover, whose article, Oh! Ah ah pree trra trra, extends sociality beyond the human to ‘speculative and expansive interspecies encounters’, Sam Mackay who examines ‘The sonic politics of “Clap for Carers” […] as participative sonic arts practice’ and Chris J. H. Cook whose article, Trevurr: A dialogic composition on dementia, auraldiversity and companion listening, ‘documents important aspects of participatory practice with neurodiverse collaborators, told through the lens of a co-created sound work.’

Duet for Vinyl [extract]. 2004

Withdrawn from use: Silence, listening and undoing

Abstract

In his book Giving Way, Steven Connor provides a list of unappreciated qualities. This list starts with a capitalised, ‘SILENCE’. Shyness, reserve, withdrawal and holding back accompany silence in a long sentence of qualities, which ‘tend to be marked with disapproval, sympathy or revulsion’, and some of which are, as Connor notes, ‘characterized as a mental disorder, in the form of social anxiety or social phobia’ (Connor 2019: 1). 

Silence is often seen as a lack of agency, an anti-social and suspect unwillingness to participate. But as a sound artist working with field-recording, I am aware that silence, withdrawal and holding back can also be a form or method of participation and social practice. Since 2004, my sound work has included a series of physical and imagined silent releases. The article draws on these works and the writing of, amongst others, Steven Connor, Seán Street, Hamja Ahsan, Gaston Bachelard and Dylan Thomas, to explore silence as a potential, shared and communal space; an immediate composition that invites both listener and non-listener into its congress. Listening in on the conversation of telephone pauses and the closed paragraphs of library shelves, silence can be heard undoing purposeful agency, shyly engaging us in the anti-social practice of inaction, so that we might not participate, together.

I am grateful to the editor of Organised Sound, Prof Leigh Landy, Tullis Rennie, Jan Baiton and the peer reviewers for their critical guidance and support. Thank you as always Julia Hall for your insight and patient ear.

Organised Sound 26/2 is available on-line here.

1. Dylan Thomas. 2016. Under Milk Wood.
2. Steven Connor. 2019. Giving Way

Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp

A new album of seven Séances for air guitar hour hand and harp is now available on Bandcamp.

In a concert of paranormal music, notes are plucked from thin air as the haunted strum of votives, hour-hands, and the missing fingers of an amputated doll’s hand, play upon the strings of an electric guitar and abandoned autoharp . Divined in séance with the breeze and occasionally breaking through the interference of a faulty guitar socket, invisible melodies emerge, cluster and evaporate:

teasing […]
sound out
of

substance: the
air
paired fibrous
with
syllables: 

Earth as Air. Gustaf Sobin

The ethereal music of aeolian instruments, has long been associated with other worlds and ghostly communication. In his poem, The Eolian Harp (1796), Coleridge refers to: ‘Such a soft floating witchery of sound’. For Coleridge music sleeps in the air:

Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air 
Is Music slumbering on her instrument. 

William Jones, the 17^th century natural philosopher, proposed that this ‘slumbering music’ originated not in the strings of the harp [or guitar], but in the air itself. The instrument operated as a ‘sound prism’ ‘[refracting] the wind,’ dividing [divining] and revealing ‘vibrations […] already present in the air.’

Séance for harp hour hand and bird song. 2021. Film still.

As a premonition of the album’s forthcoming release, a new short film made in correspondence with the piece Séance for harp hour hand and birdsong is available to view on Vimeo.

The full septet, Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp, is available as a digital download via Bandcamp. The album download includes a bonus track, Séance for stones radio mast hour hand and harp, recorded in 2021 at Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight, and featuring the litho-telegraphy of a pebble tapped on a missing radio mast, choreographed and performed by the movement artist Julia S. Hall. As the former location of Marconi’s radio experimentation station, Knowles Farm was the site of the first ‘over the horizon’ wireless transmission to The Lizard Telegraphy Station, Cornwall in 1901. This track, which featured at the Helicotrema X festival of recorded audio (Venice, Barcelona, 2021) is also included with the hand-rendered, artist limited editions. These physical editions are available in three forms: 1. Artist edition audio cassette + album download; 2. Artist edition A6 Séance card + planchette + album download; 3. Very limited full set of, audio cassette + Séance Card + planchette + album download. Full details below.

• 

• 

• 

Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp:  Artist Ltd Edition Audio Cassette C40
Cassette + album download + bonus track
Edition 6
An artist limited edition audio cassette. Hand rendered each cassette is individually numbered and signed/dated with an artist edition stamp. Designed and produced by the artist, the cover/insert is printed on tracing paper and each cassette and case hand labelled with individual letters and numbers referring to its position in the edition sequence. The cassette includes the bonus track, Séance for stones radio mast hour hand and harp, recorded in 2021 at Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight.

• 

• 

• 

  OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

• 

Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp: Artist Ltd Edition Seance Card
A6 Seance Card + planchette + album download + bonus track
Edition 20
An original artist edition A6 postcard, printed on luxurious 600gsm superfine card, uncoated on both sides.
This artist edition postcard has three visual variations (readings).  Hand numbered, signed/dated with the artist edition stamp, each postcard is accompanied with a free album download and a rubber-stamped hand planchette, which may be used to hold séance with other worlds. The postcards have been shuffled and will be sent out in the order divined by the shuffle.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp:  Full Set: Artist Ltd Edition Audio Cassette and A6 Seance Card
C40 Audio Cassette + A6 Seance Card + planchette + album download + bonus track
Edition 5
Combined artist limited edition of A6 postcard (with hand printed planchette), audio cassette and full album download including bonus track.

Please note: Cat is for scale purposes only and not included in package.

All digtal and physical media formats are available via: sebastianehegarty.bandcamp.com

air tours: six radios and a piano

In the autumn of 2018 I toured the air. The tour was problematic, not in terms of content or audience response, but in terms of what constitutes a tour. I decided that two performances, separated from each other in place and time, is the minimum axis required for a tour to occur. The bag was packed, the t-shirts printed.

The tapping the air tour consisted of two performed transmissions for six radios. It started in September at The Iklectic Art Lab and concluded at the APT Gallery in October. Both micro-FM transmission were based on field-recordings made on the Lizard Peninsular during a covert residency at Marconi’s Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station in Cornwall: site of the world’s first ‘over the horizon’ wireless transmission.

Photography: Nicolò Becciu.

Tapping the air: for six radios and a piano was part of Eclectic Electronics, an evening of experimental sound work at the Iklectic, curated by Bernhard Living and including performances by Lucie Štěpánková, Lucia H Chung, Phil Durrant & Pat Thomas.

The performance began by tuning through the signal jammed London air in search of an available and vacant radio frequency. A vacancy found the six radios are individually tuned into the signal of the transmitted soundscape. However, the signal is never stable, the position of each radio and my physical proximity to them shift and recompose the sound transmitted, establishing a localised and dynamic soundfield.

This soundfield was haunted by the recorded dit-dit-dit of Marconi’s test signal being tapped out on the architectural remains of communication technologies that litter the Lizard landscape. The call of this tapping receives a live response in the geological tap of Serpentine pebbles on the frame and strings of the Iklectic piano. As the transmission closes the choreographer Julia Hall taps unseen on the external wooden walls and windows of the building: a signal coming through from the other side, testing substance and questioning presence.

tapping the air: for a fragment of chalk and any number of  radios 
edit / opening / 03:02 / mp3 / 2018
edit / ending / 03:39 / mp3 / 2018

At the APT Gallery, Tapping the air: for a fragment of chalk and any number of radios, invited the audience to tune into its frequency. The performance began with the audible dissolve of a chalk fragment exhumed from the cretaceous geology of Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight (site of Marconi’s early radio transmissions and the Marconi Monument). As the International Ocean Boy slowly tuned into the slither of a vacant FM frequency, the prehistoric static of CO² escaping from the dissolving chalk was absorbed into the emerging atmospheric shush of radio transmission.

on Eire

In April I took part in the Transient Topographies conference at The National University of Ireland in Galway. This fascinating international conference brought together artists, writers and scholars to explore ‘space and interface in digital literature and art.’ Whilst in Galway, the artist, musician and writer Sharon Phelan invited me to take part in a short interview for a show on RTE Lyric FM. During the interview we discussed my covert residency and transmission at Marconi’s Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station in Cornwall, and the broader themes of time, place, materiality and loss, explored in the paper I had delivered at the conference. Serendipitously, the faintest tick of an unobserved wall clock conspired to interrupt our first recording and we had to move our chairs away from said clock so as to keep time at a distance and out of the microphone’s earshot.

You can hear the interview and listen to the clock not ticking, here.

Thanks to Sharon for adeptly editing my words into sense and to Anne Karhio for inviting me to speak at the conference.

 

Lets get lost and found and lost again…

Lets get lost and found and lost again: sound walking

Let’s get lost. Southampton as the Situationist City is part of Being Human, a national festival of the humanities led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in partnership with the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. As part of the Southampton Festival, curated by Dr Flavia Loscialpo, I composed a series of vestibular soundscapes for mobile phone and the transient spaces of Southampton.
The public are invited to create their own audible desire line through the acoustic map of Southampton provided by these sonic pins. The audience may listen to the mobile soundscapes in situations and at times of their own choosing, finding and composing their own acoustic path through the city.

The  7 soundscapes will be available via this blog for seven days  and the project will be introduced through an evening spent sound walking: a guided perambulation, listening through the transitory acoustic spaces for which and from which the soundscape were composed. This sound walk will be led by myself and will take place after the official opening of the Southampton Festival at Solent Showcase Gallery on Friday 17^th November. Tickets for the Southampton festival opening and sound walking event are free and available here.

Following the festival the soundscapes are now available  below.

sound walking: lets get lost and found and lost again.
Friday 17^th November 2017: 18:30 -19:30: Book Now

The seven soundscapes are available below. These can be streamed live from any mobile device or downloaded to a computer and transferred to your phone. It is recommended that participants in the sound walking event download the sounds to a computer via the Soundcloud links below and transfer the soundscapes to your mobile phone prior to the walk on the 17^th November. Please note: the soundscapes cannot be downloaded directly from this blog to a mobile phone.

The sound walk will take approximately one hour and will include the use of stairs and elevators and as such may not be suitable for those with restricted mobility. I am grateful to the K6 Gallery for allowing me to use their gallery space as one of the sonic pins. As part of the Southampton’s broader Being Human Festival, participants will be creating a visual map of their listening journey. All materials for this will be provided on the evening.

Thank you to all those who got list with me.

Soundcloud links are no longer active.

The seven soundscapes are available below, presented in the sequence they occurred during the sound walk

 

Bench: arrivals | 07:02 | mp3 | 2017

 

Stairwell: ascending | 07:17 | mp3 | 2017

 

first message for public telephone | 02:00 | mp3 | 2017

second message for public telephone | 02:00 | mp3 | 2017

 

Lift: uP | 02:59 | mp3 | 2017

 

Lift dOWN | 02:55 | mp3 | 2017

 

bench: departures | 09:20 | mp3 | 2017

 

 

 

Radiophrenia: tapping air and silence

Radiophrenia Poster: Emer Tumilty

I am delighted to announce that two new works for radio will be broadcast as part of Radiophrenia 2017, which begins broadcasting at midnight on Monday 6^th November. Radiophrenia is a ‘temporary art radio station, offering a two-week exploration of sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts on 87.9FM, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium.’ Radiophrenia will also be available online.
The two works will be broadcast on the 8^th and 9^th of November and the full Radiophrenia schedule is available here.

Tappng the air: a wireless ecology of the Lizard Peninsula.
Radiophrenia: 09/11/17 | 09:30 – 10:00

Wireless, the air receives us: ‘scattered souls, in expected or else irremediable exile from matter…’ (Gaston Bachelard).

 In the summer of 2017 I took a holiday and covert residence at The Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station; built by Marconi in 1900 and site of the first ‘over-the-horizon’ wireless communication. Prior to this, it was thought that wireless communication was restricted to the optical horizon, there had to be a ‘direct line of sight’ between transmitter and receiver.
The ‘residency’ concluded in a live micro FM transmission to an audience of one, in what once was the ‘operating room’ of the wireless station. Broadcasting through six radios the performed transmission was based on field-recordings from a local landscape haunted by the architecture of listening and communication: the looming pulse of the Lizard Lighthouse foghorn, the automatic Morse of loose wires and antennas at Poldhu (site of the first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission), the perimeter hum of wire fences that surround the galactic ear of Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station and the abandoned listening-in of RAF Dry Tree.
The piece opens and concludes with the di-di-dit, of Marconi’s test signal, tapping away at the surface of the Wireless Telegraphy Station, a signal answered by the ethereal tap of another letter ‘s’ as performed on the nearby walls of a derelict radar room at RAF Pen Oliver.

the silence of nostalghia
Radiophrenia: 08/11/17 | 12:00 – 13:00

One part of a trilogy of silenced films, in the silence of nostalghia, all dialogue and non-diegetic sound has been removed from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia.
The silence that survives pulls the background into focus, concentrating the attention of the ear on the sonic details of an emerging landscape, wet with the revenants of footfall, entrance and exit. The textures of optical-sound silence, reminiscent of the atmospheric leaks and spillages of radio transmission, amplify the spectral and oneiric qualities of a soundscape where apparitions of place and time seem to appear, disappear, dissolve and fragment.

thunder for three guitars and a trowel

thunder for three guitars and a trowel | 07:00 | 2017 | mp3

I am delighted to be included in the programme for Datscha Radio 2017. From the 25th August the German radio station will be broadcasting ‘a garden in the air, combining radio, gardening, hospitality and contemporary discourse in a live radio festival from a garden in the north of Berlin.’ The five day radio festival will also be available as a live stream via the Datscha Radio website and subsequently archived online.

The work included was composed specifically for the festival and is based on a series of new field-recordings, which take full advantage of a particularly dank English summer. The field in which I recorded is local and colloquial; that is my own back garden, of uneven bricks, plant pots and things I must at some point do. Things get left in back gardens; they escape use and end up there, waiting for attention, purpose and repair. The nearness of such an enclosed field is helpful to the act of recording rain. I am close to my recording equipment and the site of the transitory unpredictable precipitous event I wish to record. When it rains the garden pronounces an array of wet locutions, from the interrupted drop of rain lolling through the creased guttering of leaves, to the hollow ceramic timpani of a garden pot I must fill and the occasional plink of a seldom-used trowel.

The field recordings used in the new piece differ from many of my earlier works, which are focused upon recording the sound of what is there. In order to record I make myself absent, ensuring my presence does not intrude. I aim to disappear. Informed by the timpani and plink of things left out in the rain, more recent work has included the initiation of sound, introducing things that sound into the field. There is still a sense in which I am distant (I do not attempt to play the things or acoustically intrude) and there is no desire to force the sonic environment into a musical form. The things become instruments for sounding out place, a means of fathoming the patterns and pause of air and rainfall. The arrangement or gardening of things becomes a sort of physical score, a sculptural and horticultural gamelan for the weathered performance of rainfall.

The majority of field recordings used in thunder for three guitars and a trowel were recorded on the early evening of the 18^th July. Around 8 o’clock that evening, the sky became yellow, leaves greened, air quickened and shushed. At 8.33pm the first fret of rainfall plucked at the strings of a guitar ‘set up’ with contact microphones and left out to the elements. The pattern thickened as the thunderstorm progressed, the water interrupting the signal from the contacts. Slowly it passed and the garden dripped with the return of birdsong metallizing in the resonance of a crash cymbal and the plaintive wet tick of trowel. The next day I found the silent petrichor of a damp forlorn guitar waiting in the garden, unstrung and murdered by rainfall.
In the aerial garden of the Datsha Radio the rain returns, a low that once moved across a small back garden in Hampshire, now moves across Berlin. A storm now passed continues to excite the air and pour acoustically down.

Listen to the full programme of Datscha Radio’s garden in the air here: http://datscharadio.de/en/

plucked of meaning, but still vibrating

Framework Intro: variation for a door, a sigh and a cheap guitar.

On Thursday the 6^th July I read of the sad death of composer and musique concrète pioneer, Pierre Henry. I shared the Quietus announcement of his death on Facebook and a few minutes later had a message from sound artist and Framework curator, Patrick McGinley (AKA Murmur). Patrick asked if I would be interested in recording a Framework intro for a special edition of the radio show, which would be broadcast as ‘a farewell and tribute to Henry.’ Those familiar with Framework, would know that the intro for each show is created by listeners from across the world. Contributors respond in their own way to a set of recording instructions provided by Patrick on the show’s website. Patrick needed the intro for the following day and thinking aloud said, ‘a squeaky door perhaps’. Coincidentally, on the day Pierre had died I had been recording the Lifts (elevators) on my journey to work, a sort of aural reconnaissance for a project in Southampton this autumn. Although my ear was focused on the damped shush of the Lift doors close, I unintentionally stumbled upon a normal door with an exquisite hinge: I paused, pressed record and mimed the arch of my entrance, allowing a ghost of myself to pass audibly through.

My door recording, which at the time of Patrick’s invitation seemed serendipitous, if not suspiciously portent, formed the starting point of the compositional process. In 1963 Henry used the recorded squeaks of a farmhouse door, alongside the sound of a sigh, a blocked up stream, starved pigs and other occasional off stage noises (Art Lange, The Wire) to compose, Variations pour une porte et un soupir (Variations for a door and a sigh). As a vegetarian, starving a pig seemed intellectually and morally complex, nor did I have access to a farmyard, but as I think back on the intro now composed, other elements of Henry’s variation seem to unintentionally arise, return and resonate.

On Thursday, prior to my learning of Henry’s death, I had been exploring other possible sounds for the forthcoming project. This included a Ping-Pong ball, which, at the request of the winds intermittent sigh (and the occasional impatient forefinger), rolled up and down the un-tuned strings of a cheap guitar. These aural ascents and falls seemed intended for the composition. Having recorded Framework intros before, I realised I would be required to speak the provided statement. I am always slightly uncomfortable hearing my own voice and have previously used methods to place (or hide it) it away from me, such as leaving it on an answerphone tape. In 2007 I recorded an intro with my mother reading out the Framework statement. I decided to use this recording and searched back though my files to find it. I then re-recorded her voice through the larynx of the cheap guitar strings. My mother died in 2011, and it was lovely to hear her voice, her sighs and hesitations, pronounce the air once more. This personal aural link to memory and loss again seemed appropriate for the Henry introduction. As a conclusion to the piece, I printed out the Framework statement and ‘diced’ the words into single letters and full stops. I dripped these alphabetic remains infrequently upon the guitar and listened to language disappear, plucked of meaning but still vibrating.

The premiere of Framework #606 [pierre henry] curated by Patrick McGinley was broadcast on Resonance FM last Sunday and is now available for listening and download on the Framework website. Framework is also broadcast on radio stations across the world (details here).

Thank you to Patrick for asking me to provide an introduction for his beautiful hommage and adieu concrète to Henry.

[silent] tire print

I recently visited the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at Tate Modern and saw for the first time the exquisite and fully unfurled Automobile tire print (1953). Choreographed by Rauschenberg, the print was of course performed by the foot of John Cage and the accelerator of a Model T Ford. The twenty-two foot scroll of tire ‘records nearly three revolutions of Cage’s wheel.’ Haunting the dense black tire of line I noticed another tread; a discreet embossed ghost of the un-inked front wheel. In the same room, quietly cornered by the tire is Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Together these works question not only authorship and authenticity but also the limits of the visible: the material or immaterial record of action.
These questions resonate with a number of my recent phonographic objects and actions; the microphone-less field-recordings of a silent tide, for which two silent 10” vinyl records are placed in the North Sea, one as the tide comes in and one as it goes out, and the release of silence lost, in which four silent records are [circumstantially] lost to the seas surrounding the UK.

[silent] tire printing

A few weeks ago a friend of mine told me about an auction she was helping to organise to raise money for the musician and artist Greg Gilbert, who had been diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer on his daughter Bay’s 1^st birthday. I wanted to contribute, and so for Greg and in a sonic homage to Rauschenberg’s Automobile tire print, I placed a 7” silent record under the wheel of my 1964 MGB, drove over it, reversed and repeated that action three times (corresponding to the revolutions of Cage’s wheel). I then inked up the front tire, placed the paper record cover underneath it and repeated the action again, rocking the car gently forward and backward three times.
The turntable revolution of the 7″ record mimes that of the tire. The absence of sound printed into its grooves, now offering a silence interrupted by the material inscription of harm written upon the record’s surface.

[silent] tire print is an edition of one and will be part of the auction for Greg, which begins at 6pm on Thursday 9^th March at Re:So in Southampton (viewing from the 7^th March). You can also donate here to fund treatment for Greg not available on the NHS.

 

sonic materialities: time, tides and turntables

In 2013 I took two silent records to the coast of the North Sea. I placed each record at the shoreline of the sea: one at Holme-next-the-Sea, as the tide was coming in and one at Cley, where the tide was going out. After seven minutes I retrieved each record from the waves and returned it to its sleeve.

The records have been played, or rather, performed three times. With each performance, the record of the tide changes, the coast of silica clinging to the surface shifts and silence is dislodged by the wave of the stylus. Occasionally the needle gets stuck, and the original 7 minutes of unrecorded silence locks, resumes and endures. The silence inscribed on the surface of the record is rewritten with every utterance and audition: this is not a memory of the tides, but a remembering of them.

In the summer of 2016 I performed a third variation of the tides, using the revolve of two turntables to mingle the silence of the tide coming in with the silence of the tide going out. I am delighted that this variation has been included in the latest edition of the Canadian audio online publication,  textsound. Curated by Michael Nardone, “Sonic Materialities”, ‘assembles works that blur the distinction between performance, poetry, and the sonic arts. Dialogues, field recordings, talks, electromagnetic arrangements, installations, lyric works, remixes. Nardone writes: “Sonic Materialities” explores the fugitive modes of embodiment, inscription, and exchange in phono poetic practice.’

textsound Issue 21: sonic materialities, listen here.