254

The grey area that we inhabit

Editorial by David Vélez

Recently I have noticed a tendency in acousmatic composers* to move away from the recorders, microphones, computers, samplers and synthesizers in order to explore sculptoric objects and in general explore a less acousmatic and more visual and tangible approach to their work.

Composers working with objects is not a new thing at all…what are musical instruments if not sculptural objects?

But what happens in this regard in a contemporary context?

The whole vinyl / CD / cassette / digital release thing seems to be in a point where it no longer draws the interest it drew before and this is not only an issue related to acousmatic composition. Every decade has presented a drop in music sales since 1993 as noted on this article by Mike Collett-White.

This decrease probably relates to many aspects (digital files players, youtube listening, peer-to-peer file sharing,…) but in regard of this Editorial the most important aspect is the fact that people don’t listen to music in the way they did between the 1960′s and the 1980′s. By listening to music I mean doing it as a single-task activity where you sit down comfortably -preferably on a dark environment- and listen to a full record played on your stereo, just like many of our music lover parents did with Classical music, Jazz and even early Electronic Music.
Acousmatic composition requires certain level of focus and attention that is easier to achieve in the conditions mentioned before.

But why the ‘release’ is addressed today (as noted on articles written on this journal before) as no-longer the main focus of acousmatic composition? Why are composers urging other composers to explore their work beyond a mere CD or digital file?

Somewhere along the road the term ‘sound art’ was coined and this combination of words created a grey area between music and fine arts that today puzzles the notion that many acousmatic composers have of their own practice.

For different reasons -and I am sure I am not the only one- my acousmatic compositional work has lead me to move around in this grey area and its surroundings. From playing in concerts with electroacoustic composers with classical musical training to presenting my work in Fine Arts exhibitions, I feel like I really don’t know where my work and I belong. And somewhere between choice and chance I care about this.

I care because this is what I do and I care because I don’t compose for myself: structurally I am just an end where the listener is the other end and my work is in the middle. There is this idea of an audience / spectator and beyond that there is a notion of society and culture that somehow I can’t ignore.

In regard of the sound art term this is not a simple problem of semantics or terminology. This is a problem of having sound works properly heard.

The creative and crafty action of composing is just the fun and more altruist part of my job, being networking the boring and embarrassing other half. By networking I mean anything from sending demos to using facebook / twitter to promote myself, to strategically being nice with people I don’t necessarily care about.

But what is the purpose of this Editorial? Why I am posting these questions and dilemmas in a public spot?

Because there is a tendency in sound art to asume that the allegory is the perfect figure to ‘mingle’ music and fine arts and this is producing some unfortunate, naive and timid works that sadly give the idea that fine artists are clumsy when dealing with sound and that composers are clumsy when dealing with fine arts.

An essential aspect of allegory is that it should be fully understandable to anybody, this is why it is so common, because it is ‘effective’. But is it really?

The main example of this miss-use of the allegory are most of the sculptures made with actual vinyls, CD’s or tape as raw stock.

‘This is sound art because this is an sculpture made with sound media’.

This is probably what the artists behind such works had in mind when they naively built such objects. For me this is just a lack of understanding of the deep and complex relation between acoustic and tangible and visible things.

And not only that, many sculptures made with vinyls, CD’s or tape force something that should be natural and that is presented in our everyday life when we simultaneously observe and listen. For example they are works like ‘I Wish You Hadn’t Asked’ by James Dive, ‘The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle Car’ by Jonathan Schipper, ‘Tumble Room’ by Martin Kersel and ‘Bang Bang Room’ by  Paul McCarthy that manage to present an unforced and yet strongly effective combination of sound and tangible situations where the visual and the acoustic are linked in a very natural way.

Composer Michel Chion has been very keen and fortunate on his texts about sound and visual and the relation between them; his book ‘Audiovision’ is a very useful read to anybody exploring outside acousmatic representations presenting ideas and reflections that could lead to a more successful approach to the relation between the aspects that convey in sound art.

But this is not about blaming the artists behind some of the sculptures made with vinyls, CD’s or tape. This is about looking for the right mirrors.

It’s complex to understand grey areas because their essence is the impossibility to be fully understood.

But is this about understanding? I would say this is more about appropriating and inhabiting the unclear, rather than making it clear.

For me to deal with this grey area requires to question the basis of my practice. To explore the moment between the flash of lightning and the thunder.

Requires to break out from the elitism and endogamic social aspect of the acoumsatic compositional line of work where every artist is the oracle of its own practice, and where more or less only acousmatic composers listen to acousmatic compositions.

Requires not to turn my back to my detractors but to listen to them, and more important to learn listening to them.

Requires to explore my experience where the tangible and sonic aspects are not necessarily split ends.

Requires to know that art and music theory just like philosophy are equally useful and nocive.

Requires to take advantage of working where representation is impossible and presentation is the only choice as we are nothing but a finger pointing to something that matters to us.

To deal with this grey area I must speak about what I do without authority but instead full of doubt and uncertainty, which actually is the only way to approach grey areas.

It is not about the answer but about the question.

It is about dealing with what we don’t know rather than dealing with what we know.

It is not about what we can feel, is about what we can anticipate…

[David Vélez -photo by Lina Velandia-]

* by Acousmatic composition I refer to the compositional use of decontextualized sounds unlinked to their origin and causality.

David Velez website

253

In the field. The Art of Field Recording.
CATHY LANE, ANGUS CARLYLE
(Uniformbooks 2013)

Review by Patrick Farmer

“A place is what it is because of its location. Where we are is who we are”
-Alvaro De Campos

If I were to try and comment on all the points raised in this anthology of interviews – positions therein, concerning “contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work”, it would take as many pages as the publication itself. So I shall just briefly touch on a few of what I consider to be, the more pertinent points, responding to the questions and answers contained in its pages with yet more questions, like a series of parts without a whole. What I mean by this is, herein I shall attempt a reflected sense of a jarred multiplicity. If the reader senses reflection he or she is asked to consider that my words are simply gazing back at the words that caused them to exist in the first place.

From the very first page the grounds of the book are read out loud:

“This book provides evidence for the sense that these technical and creative developments need always to be considered in the context of a conceptual or philosophical frame”

Followed by and following:

“For field recording, how the field is defined is at least as important as how the recording is itself has been accepted” (sic)

The inevitable reduction / the unmarked representation.

For a book that claims its purpose is to provide “evidence for the sense that technical and creative developments need always to be considered in the context of a conceptual or philosophical frame” there is an apparent lack of self-critique, and of separation. This observation, from its outset, stems from the lack of diversity and uninvolved questions put forward, I can’t reason why such an approach was considered in the first place. Anything that attempts to borrow from the omni-experience of field recording, as it is laid out here, and attempts to portray this embrace, through written language, will always arouse suspicion, as many of these experiences exist, outside of language, written or spoken. But what does this mean? That the language of listening need be different from the existence of audition? Perhaps we should concentrate on the dissimilarities… Perhaps instead of always looking back at Ludwig Koch, the mythos of his adolescent passerine, creating a comfortable backdrop of nature from which to project, we might consider that the present is a plane where we are able to listen to that which is not implicit and sounding, to consider that every word, or every anecdote, is as varied, loud, or as quiet as the next. Sound is unspoken in all that is spoken, and here I would proffer the advise of Basil Bunting, (being as I am not here considering electronic field recordings, rather the textual recollection and conceptual etching of such experience) the poet of Briggflatts, in his suggestion that we: “fear adjectives, they bleed nouns.” Sound has never needed us to speak for it.

It’s the reductive element of language, of inquiry, not necessarily response, that I feel needs consideration here. It’s as if hundreds of years of literary history (and here I am not only referring to the in the field publication, but field recording, in whatever guise it chooses to exist) never occurred. The San Francisco poet, Jack Spicer, once said that, and here I am paraphrasing -poets should read everything they can, as much they can that is seemingly unrelated, that poems can not live alone -we need ask everything we can, otherwise we find ourselves in an analogous position to those expert ears that permeate the pages of in the field, serving to cut an environment into pieces, guided by the constant warble of overt audible catechising… But do we concentrate on the ever forming semantics or the content therein? The repetition of the questions or the responses that follow? With text there is no need to deal with sound implicitly, in terms of bang crash and wallop; words will always be permeated with sound, leaving no need to dress sound with sound.

In nadja, Andre Breton tells of the constant encounter, the lasting loves portrayed, through extra-literary preoccupations, anecdotes, personal documents, the chance and divergence that instil in him a “supreme sense of proportion.”

“(Victor) Hugo, toward the end of his life, took the same ride with Juliette Drouet every day, always interrupting his wordless meditation when their carriage passed an estate with two gates, one large, one small; pointing to the large gate, Hugo, for perhaps the thousandth time, would say: “Bridle gate Madame,” to which Juliette, pointing to the small gate, would reply: “Pedestrian gate, Monsieur”; then, a little farther on, passing two trees with intertwining branches, Hugo would remark: “Philemon and Baucis,” knowing that Juliette would not answer; we have reason to believe that this marvellous, poignant ritual was repeated daily for years on end; yet how could the best possible study of Hugo’s work give us comparable awareness, the astonishing sense of what he was, of what he is?”

To finish this review before it begins I will say right away that such, a turning of the head, a looking or listening elsewhere, is missing from all over this book, the ability, or the desire, to talk about relationships in sound without talking about sound about sound about sound. Implicit in all language is vibration, in all things, bridges, cotton, yellow, connection. Nothing vibrates in and toward itself, as we perceive it, yet I feel the content of this book is very much a literary equivalent to a particularly anthropic impossibility of a singularity. But that’s just it. Implicit, and assumed. As I read through Breton’s initial anecdote, setting the scene, I think of how he relates the tale to love, yes! How can we do this, and I do not mean, how can we seek to emulate, but how can we listen to something other than sand without getting it in our mouths. Elsewhere in the book he speaks of the painter, Giorgio De Chirico, announcing that nothing can be said of him before: “…we have taken into account his most personal views about the artichoke, the glove, the cookie, or the spool.” I’m not saying we need adapt, fix ourselves into the selves of others preponderance, not at all, rather that this speaks volumes, and that we should, ironically, listen. There is surely more to the ear than the ear itself. What would this even mean for listening? Surely the ear does not end with listening? Surely listening does not end… So why do we coddle it so? This book, as it is, a specialist trope, makes me wonder and wonder and wander, from whom is it we are trying to wrestle back audition? Is anyone hoarding it but us?

My experience whilst reading in the field is in no way comparable, and neither should it be, to listening to the works of the individuals involved. But again, here is the point, arrived at once more, commented upon once again, why should this anthology seek to emulate the field, the appendage, it stems from but can easily survive without? The assertion that listening only concerns listening, that it only refers to that which is heard or felt, is as reductive as assuming that love is only concerned with love, that it borders only as an image of itself.

To repeat. There are so few references outside of direct auditory experience and as such it leaves me coldly considering whether this book and its always potential of multiplicity, something that evidently exist outside of the book itself in those questioned, is not even more reductive than a field recording? Imagine, between the twenty people involved, how many, shall we say, environments (the earth, the world), are attached and always attaching in a variety of encounters between imagination and the realities that frame themselves all over degrees of laterality and symmetry. I can’t help but pine for the depth of narrative, the wealth and abundance of spores, grown from individual practices. Why, even in a book concerned with a practise enmeshed in an already always enmeshing audition, would an artefact that need not lend itself to any one particular consciousness and train of experience? wWhy would it try so hard to then reduce itself and all concerned to a singularity?

I am reminded that field can indeed dissolve into field, a field, quite literally, is not only about agriculture, just as a field is not just about the ear. And what is the ear actually about anyway? Or field? We all know that we perceive the earth with the entirety of our bodies, that the ear stretches for miles and miles. Perhaps we should investigate further threads within dialectics of, for example, the digression and stasis of the ear, the written ear, the latent auricular, the gesture of Francesco Maria Grimaldi as he plugged appendage, immanently greeted by the infinite well of the intramural, Kafka’s mole, the invisible ear, the recorded ear, Guillame Apollinaire’s extreme disparity of structure, Thomas Browne’s mandrake and clouds, I could go on, and I’m not saying this is all there is, but considering the unique place from which such a book arose, I would have liked to have at least experienced a modicum of totality.

Why are we still talking about listening as if for the first time it were being given its due? The phenomena, the content of the ear, is everywhere, seemingly doomed to try and learn what we should simply recognise  In all this listening we seem to have forgotten that we’ve been listening all along. We cant any of us be aware of all the developments occurring in all these vast and interdependent fields, but what is remarkable about this book, for me, is that it doesn’t really touch upon anything contemporary when discussing relationships of the world and its representations, but as I stated earlier, I would ask the reader to sense a rumpus borne of the questions of the book, and not primarily the answers, as providing impetus around and around my words. The empty ear struck from within, roaring.

In the field had to happen, but I hope we can begin to stop talking about and considering listening as something exclusive to the distinction of field recording, and, if we are going to talk about it, which I am happy we are, begin to consider that we’ve always been listening, and that the preponderance of attention paid to it as a quasi-eccentricity is not a contemporary notion bar the inevitable nuances that make it so, the distinction, I might add, that enables us to reduce through magnification. Please do read this book.

[Cathy Lane, Angus Carlyle]

Cathy Lane website
Angus Carlyle website
Uniformbooks website

252

Four walks around a year: Spring. SEBASTIANE HEGARTY
(Gruenrekorder 2013)

Review by Jay-Dea Lopez

It is often said that a place cannot be known until each of its seasons have been observed. The transitions in temperature and light, the migration of wildlife and the changes in human activities each signal the way in which a particular site is in a permanent state of flux. In the past landscape painters have depicted visual changes characterised by each season; classical music such as Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” sought to interpret the temperament of each season. So it would seem field recording is a perfect medium to follow in this tradition, capturing local sounds as they ebb and flow with the seasons. This is precisely the aim of Sebastiane Hegarty’s latest work “Four walks around a year: spring” released through Gruenrekorder.

The Winnall Moors Nature Reserve is the object of study in Hegarty’s four walks series. “Spring” is the first in a series of soundscapes interpreting this reserve which lies close to the city of Winchester in England. Hegarty’s plan is to represent each season through a 25-minute soundscape, the timing corresponding with approximately how long it takes to walk the full circuit of the reserve. Unlike other soundscapes specific to a particular area Hegarty’s “Four walks around a year” is not interested in faithfully detailing the exact location of each sound recorded, rather he attempts to mix the recordings in such a way that the underlying tone or ambience of the site is reproduced for the listener. If the Winnall Moors Nature Reserve is as filled with the tranquil timbre that is presented in this soundscape then Hegarty has fulfilled his objective.

“Spring” merges the sounds of animal life with those of people either working in the park or enjoying the park recreationally. The piece opens with a recording of a dawn chorus and later progresses to the sound of a bird caught in a net. The contrast between the two is quite poignant. Interspersed between the sounds of birdlife we overhear snippets of conversation between workmen as they maintain the infrastructure of the park. Listening to them we are reminded of how constructed this natural place actually is. For a brief moment we are also privy to conversations between adults and children as they engage with the natural elements of the park. By including these vignettes Hegarty captures what feels like a moment of hope for the future.

Just as the reserve can partly be seen as a construct so too is Hegarty’s soundscape. We are especially reminded of this as we overhear Hegarty himself in the recordings. The sounds created by Hegarty as he walks upon a frosted boardwalk remind the listener of his role in sourcing the material that is eventually used in the soundscape; there is something physical or tangible about his presence in these crisp crunching steps that position us there in his boots. As we listen to him we become his companion throughout the walk.

“Four walks around a year: spring” is a good beginning to what promises to be an absorbing series of work by Hegarty. As the sounds endemic to the ensuing seasons are recorded it will be interesting to compare not only the differences between what can be heard but also the way in which Hegarty presents them. We look forward to hearing more from Hegarty in summer.

Sebastiane Hegarty website
Gruenrekorder website

251

Grand Union Canal at Harlesden: Willesden Junction

PART III

A crow and a Recycling Facility
Text and sound by David Velez
Photos by Lina Velandia

Download ‘A crow and a recycling facility’ by DAVID VELEZ

My interest in recording sounds is just part of a larger interest in documenting my experiences to have material either to analyze, utilize as raw stock for creative purposes or just present as documentation.

When I went to Grand Union Canal at Harlesden I found the location particularly appealing and emotionally significant: the mixture of residential and industrial buildings, the invading vegetation towards certain decaying constructions, the 150-year old train station where old and contemporary mix and contrast; the canal with the still water reflecting the landscape, the commuters returning from work…and for some reason all I thought about was footage and photos of documentaries of British rock, punk and metal bands that grew up and started to play music in areas similar to these where loud factories and residences coexist under some imposed tolerance and harmony.

On Harlesden it was the first time –other than in workshops- that I worked in the same location with two other phonographists. My reaction to this situation was to walk away from the team and find a lonely spot where I feel I could stay at and record long fragments of sound. I always need to be as lonely as possible in order to record sounds. I feel the presence of people distract me from establishing an emotional sense of resonance with the environment I am recording. A question I ask to myself is whether solitude is just a technical aspect to recording or if I actually record to search for solitude, and I think they both equally apply.

Once I thought that when I am the only human in an environment I somehow become the eyes and ears of humanity: I embody the universe being self conscious and self aware of its existence. Likewise when I am alone and my interaction with the environment is minimum in a way I feel like I am not there, I feel like I am just a witness of a world that I am not a part of. Loneliness creates a membrane between the world and me. A membrane between my perception and the world that is build through the perceptive process. In a way solitude is a membrane that splits myself in two: inside and outside.

So there I was alone between a singing crow and a Recycling facility with just me and the canal between them.

Once again my solitude reflected properly in an environment build by the sounds machines and birds; a situation that is familiar to me to the point it has become recurrent in my practice.

But why birds? Why machines? What is what I look / find in them?

The songs of birds are culturally linked to the origins of human verbal communication and also to certain sense of lyricism in music.

In the other hand machines stand for noise, for sound pollution, for unwanted songs that are potentially disturbing and even unhealthy to the ear. The sounds of machines reminds us of the overwhelming presence of progress and the how we cope with it to the point that this noise becomes an essential part of our everyday environmental experience.

But are those definitions related with my actual interest on them? Are those the reasons that motivate me to record them? Or is it purely a formal and aesthetic quest? Is there a possibility of actual formalism when the basis of my practice is untreated documentation?

For me the purpose of an artist whether sonic or visual is to find meaning in the form and to express meaning through form without necessarily being aware of what this meaning is in terms of human language.

I remember a Jazz musician, whose name sadly escapes my memory, that when asked about the meaning behind his work in an interview, he said that if he could articulate it with words he probably wouldn’t need music to do it. The more I work with sound and the more I explore other media, the more I agree with him.

-David Velez

Recordings and photos captured on 19/02/2013. London.

David Velez website
Lina Velandia website

250

Grand Union Canal at Harlesden: Willesden Junction

PART II

Willesden
Text and sound by Yiorgis Sakellariou
Photos by Lina Velandia

Download ‘Willdesen Junction’ by YIORGIS SAKELLARIOU

Most of the time I make recordings on my own therefore when I record with other people it’s a rather exceptional situation, certainly more fun and more social. Nonetheless, the feeling of having a personal experience is unspoiled. After setting up our equipment we immediately wandered away in our own little private worlds where we independently selected which specific sounds attracted us more and started recording in our personal tempo. A recording session with others can be, perhaps surprisingly, more explorative. Being somehow all together makes it easier for me to walk further than I normally would in order to discover more sounds, helps me concentrate more, record longer and, influenced by my peers, to listen from different standpoints. If I was totally alone I’d be less comfortable to work in this way and I would probably just get upset about people walking and biking around. Generally in urban environments, such as the canal near Willesden station where we decided to record, I always feel like I am some kind of “invader” that interferes with people’s lives. No matter how discrete I try to be, the headphones and microphone that I use become noticeable by people. Of course this doesn’t affect the overall soundscape but it does give me a feeling of urgency and pressure. The presence of my fellow recordists reversed this feeling; it was as if we were claiming the territory for our recording purposes and people passing by were trespassers that disturbed our sonic world. We turned the canal into a big recording studio and that gave me the chance to explore the area without rush or stress. Also, I seriously doubt I would have visited this place if Maria hadn’t suggested it.

As for the canal itself, the first impression when we got there was that I was listening to a rather typical urban soundscape where industrial sounds and traffic hum juxtapose with the singing of the few courageous and persisting birds. Nonetheless, we can always try to listen to the extraordinary in what appears to be ordinary. So, as time was passing by and I was starting to listen more carefully, I noticed a hollow and haunted drone which I suppose was created by the sounds of the machines of a construction work area that were resonating across the canal. Since the machines’ sounds were also preserving their metallic and percussive nature, they formed a peculiar pair with the resonating drone. It was quite mystical and spooky, contradicting to the “realistic” environment of the location. A bit further down the canal the soundscape changed dramatically. The machines’ sounds were heard from bigger distances and crows were emphatically marking their presence. Is this “nature vs. factory” combination of sounds unwelcomed? In my ears it is not. If I focus on the crows’ sounds there’s obviously a lack of clarity in the recordings and if I’m interested in the power and tension of the sound of the machines I should have been much closer to them. But sonic environments created this way are very characteristic and familiar and they can offer many moments of listening pleasure. After all, the cities that we most live in, throughout a main part of our lives, sound somehow similar to this, so we should continue exploring and listening with more open mind and ears. We might be surprised with how many interesting details we can discover and eventually start enjoying and appreciating our normal everyday urban soundscape.

-Yiorgis Sakellariou

Recordings and photos captured on 19/02/2013. London.

Yiorgis Sakellariou website
Lina Velandia website

249

Grand Union Canal at Harlesden: Willesden Junction

‘Grand Union Canal at Harlesden: Willesden Juncion’ is a sonic, visual and written essay based on the collective experience of Maria Papadomanolaki, Yiorgis Sakellariou, Lina Velandia and I at this location situated in the north of London on February 19.

During the closing dinner party of the ‘In the field’ symposium (where I was invited by CRISAP and the British Library to give a lecture) Maria Papadomanolaki, Yiorgis Sakellariou -sound artists-, Lina Velandia -photographer- and I engaged in an interesting conversation that prompted a mutual interest in finding and explore a location within the London area that could visually and sonically appeal us. The original plan was to record in an abandoned building in Harlesden close to the Willesden Junction train station but we were not allowed to get in, and since they had security personnel and vigilante dogs, we didn’t manage to sneak in either. A few hundred meters away from the building we found the Grand Union Canal and this is where the exploration actually took place.

-David Vélez

PART I

Willesden
Text and sound by Maria Papadomanolaki
Photos by Lina Velandia

Download ‘Willdesen Junction’ by MARIA PAPADOMANOLAKI

The coexistence of industry and nature seems like a common theme in many urban and rural locations in Britain. Present-day UK has its roots in industrialism, after all. The use of the term nature almost feels like a paradox in such a context. It is present nonetheless and what we encountered in Grand Union Canal was another expression of this condition. What is the sound of such a concurrence? Or, even more inconveniently, what’s one’s presence and position in such a landscape? How can one follow the lines, flows and movements of its everyday trespassers and commuters? And I say trespassers for it felt like all the birds in the canal were living on the dividing line between the recycling sites and factories.  The location was dominated by some kind of informal aural division too. The acoustic properties of the space provided a varied pallet of resonances. The west-bound side was busy with machinery and industrial activity whereas around the east-bound side things were a tiny bit more subtle allowing to the delicate sounds of birds to become more audible. By recording the canal, I tried to answer some of the above questions, perhaps not with great success but with keen ears, eyes and body nonetheless. I did learn a lot from the process. I did two recordings, one on each side of the canal. For the purposes of this post, I chose to present the sounds of the east side of Grand Union Canal.

Most of the time, I like to walk around a place. That’s the best way for me to relate to it, to understand its many undertones and in the long run to inhabit it.  It is interesting how walking can sometimes help the senses to become more alarmed. It is a longstanding process that is still under development; a method to tentatively relate to my surroundings; “tentatively” means to be open to happenstances; to try to be open. And that’s exactly how I experienced the canal. Until recently, I was mainly using binaural microphones which facilitated my walking habit. For “Willesden”, I applied for the first time my “binaural” mode in recording with a shotgun microphone; a rather challenging and in theory impossible idea from its conception. I attempted however to take some advantage of the microphone’s directionality. I recorded my footsteps on different surfaces as I encountered them or I tried to follow my head’s reaction when different sounds occurred. In that sense, I used a more reactive approach. I eventually synchronised with the events as they happened. I focused on my body’s response and relation to the landscape as opposed to the sounds themselves. I tried to fit with the transient scenery of the passing trains, cyclists, ducks, crows, crackles, hums and splashes by being on the move.  The mobility of my approach unfortunately caused a disruption, what David later described to me as accidental live editing, which can be heard towards the end of the recording. The sounds that stood out for me were the bizarre echoes of passing trains that changed depending on my position, the textures of the different pedestrian surfaces (wood, pebbles, cement, grass) as well as the bursts of bird sounds from within a constant drone made of distant machinery and train traffic.

-Maria Papadomanolaki

Recordings and photos captured on 19/02/2013. London.

Maria Papadomanolaki website
Lina Velandia website

248

Framework Seasonal -Issue #4 Spring 2013- VA
(Framework 2013)

Review by Chris Whitehead

Words can be sound art too. The introduction to every one of Patrick McGinley’s framework programmes contains the promise that ‘framework is a show consecrated to field-recording’. The word ‘consecrated’ has two emphasised consonants that create beats like a car passing over a railway line or a heartbeat, particularly if you repeat the word over and over until it loses its meaning.

consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consecrated consectrated

Its use here, rather than the words ‘devoted’ or ‘dedicated’ for instance, suggests an important distinction. The show will not be a programme about field-recording, it will be a field-recording composition in itself. The hour will be consecrated, set apart for a purpose, the purpose of listening. Very few radio programmes value silence and quiescence as significantly as framework.

Catalepsis is a state of involuntary rigidity of the limbs: A suspension of sensation and volition. Jay-Dea Lopez uses nocturnal recordings of insects to make this ever tightening tourniquet of gradual paralysis. Insects are often treated as little other than hard machines, with their robot like exoskeletons and their ability to make Geiger-counteresque stridulations in various ways.  Here they form a songless choir of increasingly insistent, inhuman sound, unnervingly electronic in nature, closing in and enveloping, shutting down the senses. When disturbed people in films wake up sweating and say they feel things crawling all over their skin as they tug at their clothing, this maybe what they mean.

The Kinsendael natural reserve in Brussels is a place where nature and the urban cityscape bleed into each other. Flaviene Gillie recorded in this fragile liminal zone during the winter of 2012, where a metal sign at the entrance to the nature reserve is defaced with graffiti by ‘Koop’ and ‘Bird’. Indeed as with any naked space in any city investors are constantly looking to fill the emptiness with buildings.

For me Gillie evokes that peculiar smell of waterside plants and exhaust fumes, a singular cocktail that only occurs at these small oases set within urban sprawl. We hear birds and sirens, vehicles pass and an engine throbs away (some sort of pump?). Then a shock, a gunshot, a barking, snarling dog at close proximity: A wave of physical danger. This influx of barely leashed violence from the tower blocks dropped into the centre of this piece is the fulcrum around which the rest of it revolves: The nail on which it hangs.

After quite palpably being in the real world of trees, city, threatening dog and passing vehicles, France Jobin illuminates a placeless inner realm. Using material collected from the huge Morongo Casino, then stretching and polishing it into a sepulchral glow. She creates a fully self-sufficient interior world. Air-conditioned, glittery and burnished, a kind of temple music for a temple dedicated to money and chance. This is a truly beautiful piece. As it begins to slowly fade the music becomes a veneer of peripheral sheen: As thin, superficial and temporary as the allure of shiny dollars, before it melts into silence.

Yannick Dauby and Olivier Féraud use a dead tree as their instrument. With the close proximity brought about by headphone listening it claws at the ears with pointed branches and dry twigs. Through speakers the room is full of desiccated creaks and peculiar crackles and feels prone to collapse. A tone akin to a trumpet is evoked, bizarre in its provenance, probably created by the rubbing of branches together. I’ve encountered these brassy, wind instrument emanations before in windblown trees.

Dauby and Féraud don’t set their improvisation in a landscape, they focus in on the heart of the wood only. There’s a joy in their exploration and a sense of discovery as new and strange sounds emerge. Indeed the whole genesis of this track seems to have been a chance encounter with this lifeless tree.

Stefan Paulus opens out a vast space filled with alpine air and grass. A gurgling stream gives way to bells clanging, an undulating drone underpinning their sonority. Sheep bleat and make the title ‘A Journey into a Spatial Fold’ particularly apt. The crackle of vegetation, breaking stalks, possibly sheep cropping grass: A plane crosses the stereo field at the end and emphasises the vault of the sky under which this document of sound cartography has unfolded.

These field recordings were collected from the alpine valley of Ötztal, on mountain peaks, Atlantic islands and sea ports. Gathered by Paulus during psychogeography drifts, unpredetermined physical and temporal explorations into landscape and topography, the recordings were composed into an altered reality using cut-up and fold-in methodology. Nothing is real. Everything is real.

Track 6: Keening laminar sheets of sound converge and overlap in scoured metal layers. We have shut out nature. This manifests itself in a steely industrial netherworld. 8 minutes and 40 seconds in and a huge mechanical churning peaks out and scrambles this structure from the inside. Intentional clipping occurs with various effect depending on your choice of listening apparatus. The raw material from which this untitled piece is forged was collected from Lima and Panamá City by Francisco López, but any sense of place has been expunged.

Krs Marina Vinter is a night water recording by Terje Paulsen containing infinite intricate detail and an unfussy delicacy of presentation. Beautifully rich and multilayered, distant rumbles occur far away as small clouds of bubbles rise and disperse close by. Waves gently swirl and break and ships can be imagined, hinted at by the odd metallic sound. Paulsen’s material for this piece was collected from a marina in Kristiansand, Norway. The dark sky and cold air infuse into the fluid dynamics of this piece.

Maile Colbert’s contribution comes at you from a very different standpoint to anything else on this album. Constructed with all the compact, structured logic of a song, it evolves from an emotional core. Helen’s Hands is Colbert’s hymn to the memory of her grandmother. It lasts little more than four minutes.

Through the distance of time and the detritus of gathered dust slow cello like instrumental tones rise and fall. Across all this a Hawaiian dawn chorus sings in its many various voices. At just one point the hint of human speech: Just a sound. Did it happen? Was it there? When the music fades we’re left with a solitary bird calling and the imperfection of past time still audible.

Helen’s Hands is dedicated to Colbert’s grandmother, and her piano hands, and all that they have touched. The framework radio site contains a poem by D. H. Lawrence alongside this work. The poem ends ‘Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.’

In contrast to Maile Colbert’s careful composition, Luis Antero leaves the world to compose itself and documents the interplay of birds, water and humans as they occur in real time. Antero’s numerous recordings from his native Portugal are jewel like and transparent in their purity. He never interferes. He never enters the recordings.

Volta Do Castelo is a river, a swift river, trees full of birds and someone probably fixing a roof at a distance.  Because Antero belongs to these places in a spiritual and emotional way, it is tempting to think that his choices of site are informed by the land itself. That he’s drawn to these places by ancestral memory and an attempt to map it in sound. A pure field recording and a fine way to end this compendium of framework radio contributors.

Maybe it’s a little unimaginative to review these tracks in the order they appear on the album, but I wanted to highlight something: In any compilation the choices of the compiler are important. They designate a path along which we travel and they sculpt the terrain. This particular path takes many twists and turns through synthetic plains and back into lush forests, we plunge beneath water and traverse mountain valleys, but it is as promised purely consecrated to field recording.

These are the editor’s notes

Framework website