TouchRadio: Recent Episodes
Touch
TouchPod is the podcast for TouchRadio, which offers a selection of recordings, live or otherwise, from artists who are affiliated to or whose work appear on Touch, including Oren Ambarchi, Thomas Ankersmit, Leif Elggren, Christian Fennesz, Bruce Gilbert, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Howlround, Philip Jeck, Bethan Kellough, Jiyeon Kim, Tony Myatt, Phill Niblock, BJNilsen, Yann Novak, Stephen O'Malley, People Like Us, Peter 7 Paelinck, Pinkcourtesyphone, Peter Rehberg, Simon Scott, Simon Fisher Turner, Mark Van Hoen, Chris Watson, Jana Winderen, Pascal Wyse and others.
Buildings, and the spaces and atmospheres that they enclose, are primarily experienced through seeing them and hearing them. Visions of them are the trajectories and alterations of light that travel within them to the observer. Audition of them is via the patterns of reflected and diffracted sound that repeatedly pass the observer as their energy decays and spreads. Just as buildings have a visual signature (what they look like) so they have an aural one. Each is dynamic: changing how a room is lit will change how it looks, making different kinds of noise within it will reveal different aspects of its sound. However, exploration is bounded by the laws of physics and perception and the fixed nature of the buildings themselves. Useful techniques and modes of expression such as feature exaggeration, time manipulation, rapidly changing or impossible perspectives and micro/macro-scoption require augmentation of reality, but enable boundaries to be exceeded. It becomes possible to experience not just what a building is, but how it is in our perception; how, for example, the different elements of its geometry and fabric relate to each other and the individual contributions they make to the whole.
The fixed nature of buildings is one of their defining characteristics. They often stand immutable amongst the peoples, their cultures and technologies, that create them and use them. They are perhaps the person made things that change most slowly over time and reach furthest into our present from their past. The National Centre for Early Music is housed within the Medieval church of St Margaret in the Walmgate area of York. Traces of Sound and Light was site-specific fixed-media installation created by this author and the visual artist Annabeth Robinson. Based on data obtained from light detecting and ranging (LIDAR) and acoustic impulse response measurement (AIR) it used technological augmentation of the both the observer and the space to literally enable the audience to see and hear the space which they are within in new ways that would otherwise be impossible. A 3D animation derived from the point cloud obtained from the LIDAR process was delivered to head-mounted smartphones worn by the audience, and audio created solely from the AIR measurements and readings of text fragments inscribed within the space was diffused via multiple loudspeakers.This is binaurally captured (and therefore ideally suited to headphone listening) audio from the version of the installation presented in St Margaret's at the 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio.
Image: Annabeth Robinson
This is a composition of field recordings taken at various wind turbine farms over the last year. They are recordings taken as part of a sound project I’m working on which looks at infrastructure; a sonic exploration into the unseen mechanics which underpin our daily lives: Power, transport, sewer systems, communications and supply logistics. The recordings presented here are in a fairly raw state and will be developed and augmented within the wider body of work. However, I think they hold different value in their 'solo' and raw form - and may be of particular interest to listeners of TouchRadio. The modern wind turbine is an awe inspiring machine - gracefully benign from two miles away, yet from within their shadow they assault an image of improbable violence on the senses. Designed to perform modern day alchemy through a screamed slicing of the troposphere, they detune the very skies which hang overhead and broadcast infrasonic resonances into the ground which i was able to record through a geophone from over half a mile away. Within the setting of ‘nature', these machines are the very definition of unnatural; up close, their rotating violations of nature's laws feel viscerally threatening.But then these locations too are, by necessity, raw and unforgiving environments. Bleak moorland at raised altitude or wide unsheltered flatlands; horizon to horizon, exposed, desolate, dystopian. The wind howls across these plains, transforming the totally inert into the wildly volatile at an instant; bracken, heather, gorse, singing fence wires dissecting arbitrary shingle boundaries for mile upon mile.
The source material was recorded in multichannel spatial format using various ambisonic and stereo air mics, geophone and contact microphones matrixed to 5 channel surround.
Equipment: Sonosax SX R4+ Ambeo / DPA 4060 / MK-416 / Telinga Mk2 JRF contact mics matrixed to 5ch / JRF prototype geophone
Thanks to Jez Riley French for the geophone loan, Rudi at Helix Branch and Emily Mary Barnett for her photography/patience.
Sifting through his archive of live recordings, Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) chose this performance from 2015 (in a very cold church in Bochum, Germany) as a favourite. As with most of his gigs, the concert was improvised, using an analogue tone generator as the main sound source, a radio, a contact mic, and a selection of pedals. Always a hit-and-miss venture, but always exciting (though at times nerve-wracking for the artist).
Photo by Constantly Consuming
Whilst on holiday in Sicily Stuart wanted to capture the sound of the local church bells. Choosing to record at 12 noon every day seemed a reasonable way to record more elaborate bell combinations whilst also fitting in other holiday plans with his travelling companion.
An edit of ten minutes from each location is included here, with 12 o’clock being positioned in the middle at five minutes to afford some context of the local area. Sicilian dialect has been used to indicate each day. Church names have been used to indicate location rather than street names, and bells from nearby churches can also be heard as the timing on each church is slightly different. Some churches ring twice, and one church not at all. The bird sounds were made by an old man hiding behind the tree that I was recording under.
Recorded using a Sound Devices Mix-Pre 6, and a stereo pair of LOM Usi omni-directional mics attached to a coat hanger.
Màrtiri – San Francesco di Paola, Palermo Mèrcuri – Cattedrale di Palermo and Parrocchia Ss Maria Assunta Iòviri – Parrochia San Girolamo, Mondello Vènniri – Chiesa di San Domenico, Palermo Sàbatu – Cattedrale di Monreale Dumìnica – Chiesa del Gesù, Palermo
"Between the City and the Forest" collects field recordings made between 2015-2018 in areas around Los Angeles, Mojave, and the Sierra Nevada. The piece features a millipede walking on a tent, many species of birds, treefrogs, electromagnetic and other urban city textures, as well as some websdr recordings.
Special thanks to Bill, Laurel, Greg, Russ, and all those I met on the Sound Recording and Analysis Workshop in June 2018.
Estonia has a rich and powerful nature orchestra, and this might be because two thirds of the country is covered with forests and bogs which are often almost untouched. Estonian nature sound is sometimes discrete and quiet, sometimes powerful, but it is always magical.
This sound piece features the magnificent performance of the orchestra over a period of 24 hours in the spring. The recording opens with a dawn chorus in the Alam Pedja nature reserve. It then travels to the primaeval forest of Jarvselja and the wetlands south of the Ahja jogi, close to Lake Peipsi and the Russian border. The latter is a boreonemoral, drained peatland and swamp forest area.
Chirping birds, croaking frogs, a barking deer and a rumbling thunderstorm make up the choir. The star performers, howling wolves, end this nature symphony just before the sun rises over the forest.
Great care has been taken to make the sound piece time and rhythm coherent as well as biogeographically consistent. Man-made noise such as woodworking has been kept as it is, an integral part of the soundscape. The intention is to render the reality as is, not to change it: quiet sounds have remained quiet and might require more concentrated listening on the part of the listener.
The music of nature moves slowly. The recorded piece invites the listener to an immersive experience. Take the time to listen through the full length and hopefully be transported.
Our thanks go to Robert Oetjen and Triin Libe of the Palupohja nature school, to Andrus Kannel as well as to Mariell Jussi and Rene Valner who have helped make these recordings possible.
This recording was made at the Block Gallery in New Cross on May 27th 2018 to mark the closing of the ‘Maquettes’ exhibition. The full text of the reading is available in issue 3 of Satori magazine. Richard Bevan supplied the recording. The photograph is by Rachel Hollings.
Through the Night was recorded on June 10th 2018 at Glenshee, Scotland during ‘Murmurations’.
Mixed with Rob Aitken, with thanks to Chris Watson + Jez Riley French.
An extract from Zachary Paul's live scoring to the 2013 movie "Under the Skin" (dir. Jonathan Glazer, original score by Mica Levi). Recorded live at PLUM, Stories Books and Café, Los Angeles, on Monday 16th July 2018.
With thanks to Lena Pozdnyakova and Eldar Tagi at The 2vvo.
This recording is made off the back balcony of the Cube Gallery in the village of Moira at around 8:15pm on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day), 2018.
The balcony looked out onto an area of open land, with a Hindu temple on one side and an old Portuguese-style cathedral on the other. I am struck by the merging of layers of sound in this scene — birds and insects, but also sometimes traffic (though the road is distant), voices, power tools and non-power tools, dogs, and various unknown activities. In the middle of the recording, an unseen train passes and somehow overtakes everything for a moment. There are sounds I cannot identify no matter how hard I listen to them.
This piece is composed by all the forces that had assembled themselves in that place at that time, on the edge of night.
Many thanks to Satinder Singh and Eric Patrick for making this recording possible.
"You really should hear the frogs," suggested our hosts. They had taken us to their country house on a warm evening in May 2017, situated beside Little River, Beaverdam, Virginia.
Late that evening, we were led down the lawn, through the darkness towards the river nearby, a few hundred yards from the house. As we neared the water, we began to hear calls from a large scattered array of frogs, littering the shallows of the near and far banks of the river. Two main species were present; the Green Frog (Lithobates clamitans) was the most common, its twangy call sometimes compared to a loose banjo string. This call is often repeated a few times, each decreasing in volume. The other call, a more sporadic, slightly comedic deep tenor is from the American Bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus).
Naturally, I wanted to get a recording. Problematically, my sound equipment had been left in Durham, North Carolina, two hundred miles away. I was over from the UK working on a documentary in NC and I only had a phone without additional mics, so had to make do.
The next day, listening back to the functional recording I’d made on my phone was deeply underwhelming. I decided that I really needed to drive back to Durham, get my sound kit and return to Little River and have another go the following night.
This recording was made with a spaced pair of DPA 4018s into a Zaxcom Nomad.
Photography: Siemon Allen.
Many thanks to Siemon Allen, Kendall Buster, Noah Angell, Kay Dickinson Pascal Wyse and The Virginian Herpetological Society.
Recorded live as part of “Touch presents…” with Philip Jeck and Yann Novak in Amsterdam on 15th March 2018. Play loud!
A free in-store performance at Noize after the 1st Mutek Festival. Heavy on sounds from his ‘pop’ album “PostFabricated”, it was accidentally recorded in mono at the event.
It was 1995; a cold fall day with heavy fog just north of the San Francisco Bay between the Bay Bridge and Jenner in Northern California. I had a spaced pair of B&K 4003 omni-directional microphones with me to capture bay backgrounds. Due to the fog I was able to capture a variety of horns throughout the day.
The piece is a collage of these horn backgrounds along with a freight container ship horn from the Port of Los Angeles. The discovery of hearing these together was a happenstance while previewing the files in unison and hearing a suspended chord automatically I perceived it as a composition.
I also added an underwater sound recorded with a B&K 8011 hydrophone of jet streams from a pool filter.
Performance recorded from the desk, live at Iklectik Art Lab, London, on 21st May 2016.
With thanks to Eduard Solaz, who took the photo.
"tic-tac-toe" was written for Gilbert Ratcliffe, who in 2017 was a final-year dance student at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire. For this performance, called "You Watching Me?", choreographed for a small group of dancers, Gil wrote:
"My research was centred on the physical and mental manifestation of my journey with Tourettes Syndrome. I explored it through the collaborative process between choreographer and dancers to see if we could create a non-narrative, abstract dance work that was able to elicit an emotional, performative response." Gil knew what the broad structure needed to be, and the dancers had ideas about sounds that would resonate well with the subject but there was lots of freedom between those staging posts. I loved how the dancers only needed occassional markers, between which they related to the sounds but werent bound by them. No need for anything as prosaic as counting out beats. Gil's research involved talking to lots of people with TS, and reading through it I got keen on the simple idea of the electrical impulses that run through the body as it moves whether voluntarily or involuntarily. In the end, its all a synaptic dance. I recorded the feet of the dancers as they rehearsed, so that the piece could conjour up unseen dancers around the stage. Elsewhere metal spins against metal, balls bounce to a stop, there is a visit to the sea shore and a recording I made of the old editor of the Guardian being "banged out", in the tradition of old Fleet Street. The painting is courtesy of Gil's mum Melanie an artist and painter who has often worked with dancers.
Recorded from 10:00 to 10:25 on the day of the partial eclipse (approx 65%) at UCLA Court of Sciences, California.
This is a two channel recording of a live solo performance using the Moog guitar plus stuff. The set was improvised and only the second time Id performed solo with the Moog (the first being the night before in Swansea). The gig was at the Brunswick Club in Bristol which houses several arts groups including BEEF (Bristol Experimental Expanded Film) who, via sound and video artist Kathy Hinde, had invited me to perform. When I arrived in Bristol and gave the taxi driver the address, he told me that the Brunswick Club was closed down, and even if it wasnt, he doubted Id be performing there. Apparently it used to be a Working Man's Club frequented by taxi drivers. Not any more.
Equipment: Moog Guitar, ebow, shortwave radio, tone generator, guitar pedals (reverb, delay, distortion and fuzz factory), plasma and bicycle lights, a childs light wand, two vibrators, portable CD player (unplugged), modified fans, mixer, and miscelaneous debris.
Recorded by Kathy Hinde.
On the edge of the jungle, where the Amazon Rainforest begins in southern Venezuela, where the Gran Sabana ends, humans are still trying to enter a world dominated by nature. Trees, rivers, animals and insects extend to the horizon, and the sounds reach our ears to remind us of their empire.
This crepuscular recording was made from 4:45am on the 14th December 2016 in the south Indian city of Kochi. I was there to play Drifting, a performance at Vasco da Gama Square, for Convening #2 hosted by the TBA21 Academy on the following day.
Live at Human Resources, Los Angeles, February 18, 2017
- Geneva Skeen - Pop Song 16:48
- Sarah Rara - Separating the Air 20:12.
For the closing of Yann Novaks exhibition Repose,Novak invited Geneva Skeen and Sarah Rara to perform inside/alongside his installation. Each artist's performance was accompanied by the sound of Novaks installation demonstrated here via a room-recording from the event.
Skeens Pop Song is a temporal response to Novaks drone work, and a cultural response to our times. In harmonizing with Novaks loop - divided into 3-4 minute segments (the average acceptable length of a pop song) - SkeensPop Song acknowledges that populist times call for populist measures, but refuses populist comfort, acceptance, and pale standards of beauty as means of resistance.
Raras Separating the Air games of listening and learning between voice and computer at the boundary between music and speech. Each part is a device to punctuate silence, divide time, move the air.
Photo: Christopher Wormald.
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Photo: Nik Gaffney (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Victorian acoustician Herman Helmholtz studied sound and sensation in the 1800s; through his research he developed the Helmholtz Resonator, this object, usually made from glass or brass, is tuned to a specific resonant frequency and used to demonstrate the principle of acoustic resonance. Helmholtz writes about using these tuned devices to listen to sustained pitches from musical instruments. He also accounts hearing waterfalls, the howling wind and horse drawn carriages through his handheld resonators, using these devices to extract tones from the environmental sounds around him.
Inspired by the work of Helmholtz, this piece incorporates both tuned and un-tuned vessels to explore resonant sound objects. Using two large glass carboys (designed as liquid transportation vessels) partially filled with rainwater, alongside two smaller Helmholtz Resonators, Surrounding Air comprises extended recordings of these acoustic objects. Each vessel contains its own unique sound space, a distinct resonating signature quietly bellowing and heard only at the point at which it meets the outside world.
Placing small omnidirectional microphones and hydrophones inside the glass reveals a unique perspective on this space. Recording a rainstorm through the vessels we hear a complex and ever-changing sound world from this fixed listening point. After capturing the sonic signature of the vessels I built a semi-generative synthesis engine in tune with the containers, moving towards a musical world tempered to these glass vessels, extracting tones from the surrounding environment in honour of Helmholtz. Listening through these objects allows us to hear the world as he may have done over 150 years earlier.
Recordings, processing and programming carried out in my home studio and rooftop in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.
As part of the Touch Conference series of events which took place on the west coast of USA April-May 2016. With thanks to Brooke Wentz.
As part of the Touch Conference series of events which took place on the west coast of USA April-May 2016
Recorded by Jake Muir. With thanks to Steve Peters and Vance Galloway.
As part of the Touch Conference series of events which took place on the west coast of USA April-May 2016. With thanks to Andrew Freid.
Ever the archivist at heart, my father, Francisco Alvelos, had the foresight of recording the national radio and television broadcasts of the Portuguese "Carnation" Revolution as it unfolded on the 25th of April, 1974. Just audio, that is: home video was still years away, as was colour TV I was then seven years old, and remember an afternoon without school, the radio hosting strange voices, a still image on the TV set. By dinner time TV broadcast had been restored and some very serious-looking men in strange garments made very serious speeches, my parents expressions of expectancy and excitement an obvious indicator that, despite being beyond my comprehension, something major was taking place. That somehow made up for the disappointing disappearance of cartoons... The World was different back then for a seven-year-old under an ailing European dictatorship.
By chance I recently unearthed the cassette tape my father recorded, and took great care in digitising it as it might not survive one last playback. It did snap once, but I managed to successfully improvise a bit of tape surgery
Here, then, are the newsflashes and the first public address of the Revolution Council to the nation: I edited out the obvious copyrighted material, and kept the marching anthems to a sensible degree. At 20 50 on this edit, we hear a declaration summarising the motives for the military upsurge; remarkable how a significant part of what is said still resonates in 2016 - and how timely that I found this recording on the eve of the Portuguese presidential election. The last 30 seconds of this edit, the tail-end of the junta declaration and the ensuing silence, are eerie in their prescience: What now?, the fumbling silence seems to wonder. It still does.
Listening while digitising, the recordings brought vivid memories of my father. And somehow I felt I was fulfilling his wish, rendered audible almost 42 years later: to preserve and convey a historical document for future generations to remember, reflect and interpret.
Heitor Alvelos, January 2016
Mono recording by Francisco Alvelos from national radio and television broadcasts in Aveiro, Portugal, April 25, 1974. Edited and mastered by Heitor Alvelos, January 2016. The dedication should be self-evident.
If ever there was a reason for 333 to break its own rules, this is it: the 33rd anniversary of the very first Touch release.
So we skip our proverbial anonymous random modus operandi just this once. We even managed to produce proper liner notes to a 3-track extravaganza. And just this once, we -are- naming our sources.
This special edition of Touch Radio is a quasi-random mash-up of prior editions: 3, 24, and 33, finely sliced into 3 hit singles in the making, each a good 3 minutes and 33 seconds in length (this one rule is unbreakable).
The original cover image was a gift from Shawn Splane, slightly altered with the addition of a further digit.
Over 18 people have died as over 40 inches of snow fell on the eastern seaboard of the United States. It was the second largest in New York City, where over 29 inches fell, since 1869... This recording was made in Williamsburg, Brooklyn using a Zoom iQ6 microphone and iPad Air 2.
Photo: Dave Knapik
"In Spring 2013 I was part of an ornithological survey (bird migration census) in a desert area in the Nile Valley, Egypt. Our team lived, considering local conditions, in a rather modern building in a town called Sandafa Al Far.
Apart from the actual work, our standardised observations, I most of the time made sound recordings of birds, amphibians, insects and the general soundscape in the vicinity of our house. Sometimes guarded by two policemen (because of an allegedly unsafe situation after the so-called Arab Spring) but always accompanied by a cluster of curious and noisy children.
The combination of an extreme climate, a precarious political situation, witnessing violence, experiencing severe health problems and not least being surrounded by an omnipresent, diverse and sometimes almost too powerful soundscape led to a somewhat surreal memory of my time there."
Photo: Marcus Held
Performed live at Resonant Forms on 11th September 2015 in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Also live that night were Simon Scott & Jen Boyd. With thanks to Volume, Rafa Esparza and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
"After a heat wave of almost one month in the south of France this is the sound of that first rainy morning at the swimming pool. I recorded the rain and thunder in the countryside near Quissac (between Nmes and Montpellier) with 2 Line Audio CM3 microphones in a spaced pair configuration into a Mixpre-D into a Sony PCM-M10."
"Mark (Van Hoen) and I visited the tunnels underneath downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday. Many miles of these tunnels are closed to the public, but a section underneath the city archive collection is open. We recorded using an iPhone 6 and a Zoom H6. One of the signs had been adapted to read SOUNDs HORNy.
To call this field recording would be crediting the situation with more adventure than it deserves. At five in the morning, with a hangover starting to percolate, the ideal conditions are surely to just roll over, hit record and go back to sleep and that is pretty much what happened here. End of disclaimer.
Boats, whether out at sea or in harbour, have a particular vocabulary of sounds. On the water, they are masked by the white noise of the ocean, in which as many sailors have reported you can hear almost any sound imaginable. Moored up, where things are quieter, the water laps and slaps the hull while the wind plays aeolian harp on the mast.
That rigging sound is often a chorus of tapping lines against masts, but this particular boat a cruising yacht with a Bermuda rig, moored at Yarmouth after a days sailing had an unusually musical voice, sounding clear notes as the wind passed through its structure. At sea this was a contented hum, but at night it felt much more ominous.
The tones in this piece were recorded in one of the sleeping cabins in the stern, a little resonant box. Of course, there has been some processing mainly to remove the snoring of sailors.
The word gibbet is used both to refer to an executional structure and to a hanging iron cage that used to display the remains of executed prisoners; when someone is thusly displayed, it is known as gibbeting.
Recording the wooden gibbet in 2012, believed to be haunted burial site and located at Caxton in Cambridgeshire, to capture the sound of the gallows wood (elm) and saproxylic (dead wood) invertebrates (beetles) that lived within it was a challenge because of the vast amount of traffic that passes by. It is located beside a busy roundabout (A428 to Cambridge) and I initially found it difficult to capture the wooden gibbet creaking and moving in the way I had envisaged. I therefore used contact microphones to get inside the construction. I was inspired by the grim history of this location, the place of multiple murders and capital punishment, and also from reading about Bernie Krause (b.1938) who, on the CD included in his wonderful book Wild Soundscapes, explains that "recordings are an illusion the best microphone systems and recorders cannot possibly reproduce exactly what our ears hear in the holophonic way that we hear it." (2002) He documented acoustic environments that faced dramatic change or extinction but often needed to recreate the sounds of nature by double tracking or changing microphone placement.
This location has changed dramatically recently as a McDonalds fast food restaurant opened a restaurant on this site recently.
This composition features unprocessed recordings from Krafla Geothermal Power Station and the nearby mudpools and steam vents of Hverir in Northern Iceland. The recordings were made in June 2014, on the Wildeye sound recording course led by Chris Watson and Jez Riley French, using a SoundField SPS200 and JrF contact microphones.
The composition draws upon the spatial experiences of recording at these sites, journeying from the booming, all-encompassing drone emitting from the boreholes; through the uncontained, explosive energy of steam vents and bubbling mud-pools; and into the inner sonic worlds of the metal pipes and geodesic structures that punctuated the lava field.
"Inspired by BJ Nilsen's performance at LACE in Los Angeles last month, I decided to attempt my own composition using field recordings. The source recordings are quite crude in comparison to those made by the great Mr Nilsen; I even used only an iPhone to collect the recordings; but after a little judicious use of processing back at the studio, I am pleased with the results. On leaving LACE after the show, I noticed how many homeless were sleeping in the doorways at the back of the venue, where my car was parked. There were several droning air-conditioners, some emitting quite rhythmic sounds. It occurred to me that there are many that would hear this as music (myself included) but it's very doubtful that those sleeping in those doorways do... or perhaps some do find some comfort or music in such sounds. I assembled several of them to create this, an anthem for the homeless."
Photo by Mike Harding taken in downtown Los Angeles
Recorded by Myke Dodge Weiskopf at Touch presents... Live in Los Angeles, 21st January 2015. With thanks to LACE, VOLUME and especially Yann Novak.
Field recording of fireworks on Saint John's Night, June 23, 2014, the local pagan inheritor celebration of the Summer Solstice. Recording by Heitor Alvelos on Bruce Geduldig and Bernadette Martou's balcony, Porto, Portugal. The vantage point, overlooking the tail end of the Douro river from a considerable height, allows the acoustic experience to become as impressive as the visual: the sound of the fireworks travels back and forth through the valley in considerable detail.
Recent trends in mass entertainment have dictated the expectation for further ingredients of sensory input, i.e. the "pure" experience of the explosives shall not be enough. Cue the arrival of pop anthems as an added sound layer that, as far as acoustics go, can only be experienced as a distraction. This is the main reason for the dramatic pitch shift in the present recording: the sound fabric is brought down to the point where pop pap no longer hurts. In the meantime, a different landscape emerges, austere and foreboding.
Edited by Heitor Alvelos in Sues, August 2014: the recording has been left unaltered save for a pitch shift of -77%. Mastered by Anselmo Canha in Porto, September 2014. Assisted at various times by Jos Maria Lopes, Teresa Serdio, Jos Canha, Antifluffy.
In May 2014, we were lucky enough to have direct access to the great machines of the industrial revolution on display in Londons Science Museum; the Mill Engine, by the Burnley Ironworks company, 1903, the Difference Engine No2, by Charles Babbage 1849.
Sound has been integral in the relationship of the machines and their operators; used as a primary diagnostic tool, the sound of various operating components reveal the machines state of well being. Operators listened to the song of their engines, gaining insight in to particular problems, and clues to required maintenance.
Using accelerometers fixed to the steelwork of the engines, we could extract this world of sound; escaping steam, muscular pistons, popping and crackling valves rhythmic and stuttering, sensitive and forthright the man made qualities of the engineering being exposed in the recordings.
Track 01. Mill Engine: A series of recordings of various parts of the engine. Track 02. Difference Engine: A complete recording of a calculation cycle, this one being the polynomial equation; Y= 41+ 4X + 7X2 + X3 + 5X4 + 9X5 + 2X6 + 8X7
All recordings are exclusive.
Audialsense would like to thank Aleksander Kolkowski and the conservators of the Science Museum.
Photo: Asako Bavister
Repose was a site specific performance in Cocky Eeks inflatable performance space, Sphr, commissioned by the 2014 AxS Festival in Pasadena, California.
The performance highlighted this unique space through a gesture-less performance of sound and light. The piece is comprised of a purely synthesized sound devoid of traditional compositional elements and was accompanied by 180 projections of pure color.
Repose is presented here in a longer form to take advantage of the digital format.
Photo: Terry LeMoncheck
3 mixes, 3 directional speakers, sound installation 2014, Jiyeon Kim @ SeMa Biennale MediaCity Seoul
'Grandmothers' Lounge - From the Other Side of Voices' is a joint work of radio producer Sang-il Choi (KR) and sound artist Jiyeon Kim (KR), commissioned by SeMa Biennale MediaCity Seoul 2014. Largely based on Sang-il Choi's anthropological audio recordings of folksongs and stories of grandmothers from South Korea, Jiyeon Kim made this sound installation adopting 3 directional speakers. This mix is especially prepared for TouchRadio.
birds without mouths 00:00~06:17
Grandmothers who had lived in mountain villages used to play with imitating bird's call. Songs about birds and imitative sounds of birds call were passed on orally. For the people who lived in mountainous areas, birds were believed to be the reincarnation of the dead, who had oppression and resentment during their lives. Most of the words and lyrics concern listening to one's sorrows and comforting one's soul. You can hear calls of the lark, owl, cuckoo, wood pigeon, pheasant, nightingale, etc mimicked by grandmothers from different mountain villages with rustling leaves and folksong on birds.
prayers 06:19~10:58
A mix of grandmothers' confessions during the act of praying with songs used in exorcism rituals. Sounds of metal resonance, water flow and feedback were added to accentuate an aspect of their lives - a shaman in their own families.
unfinished chorus 10:59~15:07
This mix starts with one of the old ladies saying, "I can't even sing." As song is assumed as a centralised and capitalised epic, marginal unsong elements are often neglected and erased. With chopped sounds and refrains from mainly labour folksongs, I focused on 'unsung elements' (breaths, humming, laughter, shouts, etc.) to be extended into another kind of song. Grandmothers' chorus would not be finished until they stop breathing.
In Spring 2009, I find myself by chance just a few hours by boat from Japans last frontier, the island of Iriomote, but I had no way to get there. Not enough time. Total frustration. The southern most island of Japan is 90% covered with rainforest and mangrove and home to many local species including not only insects, frogs and birds, but also Ryukyu flying foxes and the famous cat-leopard called Yamaneko, which was only discovered in 1965.
I make a promise to myself to return, even for short time, but with my recording equipment.
Finally this year it was possible. I went back this Summer with the help of the Tropical Biosphere Research Center University of the Ryukyus and the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, I spent a week on the island recording with a four channel microphone setup. Sadly I didnt have the chance to see the neko this time
Unmastered field recording featuring amongst others: Elegant scops owl, Ryukyu flying fox, Yaeyama harpist frog, Ryukyu ruddy kingfisher, cicadas, Ryukyu green pigeon, Ryukyu crow, white breasted waterhen
Photo: Rodolphe Alexis
Since technical evolution tends to unfold rapidly, human beings have not been able to evolve a (forewarning) sense of new forms of technology (for instance to detect radioactivity). Electronic emissions are also not sensually detectable. No one knows exactly how the technology of wireless transmitting devices affects humans. Radio, television, radiotelephones, mobile phones, GPS, computers, bluetooth and WiFi routers flood every place on earth with countless electronic waves.
Recordings of a standard WiFi router serve as the basis for the Fritz Kiste. Actually one cant really speak of (audio) recordings since the electronic waves of the WiFi are soundless. Their energy triggers the sensitive microphones, since these have been placed directly at the remote transmitting antenna. The recording - made with a D-40 Tascam, equipped with one microphone for each antenna - tapes the different transmission signals on the right or on the left channel as a stereo signal.
The WiFi router transmits at 3.4 MHz and so generates 3.4 billion cycles per second. The actual reception of the signals - eg. recorded during the transmission of an email with an image attachment - are only a few seconds long, but are prolonged through ever deeper analysis. The fragmentation was achieved via different processes, digital and analog, and via 'deceleration'. Thus fragments of a second were distended to minutes in length. In this way the router's timing-in-seconds, much too fast for human perception, becomes open to scrutiny.
The results are partly 'technoid' by which sounds are very much dependent on the timing. Sounds emerge at a high transmission activity; send-pauses sound more 'ambient'...
Howlround are the duo of Robin The Fog and Chris Weaver who create recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on a quartet of vintage reel-to-reel tape machines - with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden. This recording documents their first ever live performance at the Brighthelm Centre as part of the Resonance FM stage at the Great Escape Festival, Brighton, 18th May 2013. It was the first time these delicate, bulky, unpredictable machines had ever left the studio - a complete step into the unknown - and therefore something of an occasion. This recording is presented without edits or overdubs, just the sound of four machines, two people and a huge tangle of quarter-inch tape, looping and snarling precariously around the venue.
Photo: Larry Gale
So we pause where we began, with BJNilsen (see TouchRadio 1)...
Archival Recordings, Mixed in Berlin October 23, 2013, containing Bits and Pieces from:
Beachy Head, Eastbourne, England Karl Marx Tomb, Highgate Cemetery, London, England Whitstable Bay, Kent, England CleanCar Berlin, Mitte, Germany Temple Gas Works, Glasgow, Scotland Fruitmarket City Hall, Glasgow, Scotland Port of Montreal, Quebec, Canada Carlsberg Brewery, Copenhagen, Denmark Unknown Music School, Naples, Italy Galleria Umberto, Naples, Italy Barbed Wire, Todmorden, England Side Street, Lisbon, Portugal Tempelhof Airfield, Berlin, Germany Cave, Durness, Scotland Fishmarket, Via Tribunali, Naples, Italy Hatun, Reykjavik, Iceland The Jacobite Steam Train, Armadale, Scotland London Olympic Rehearsal, Islington, London, England Boleskine Cemetery, Scotland Train Bridge, Nijmegen, Netherlands
"I was invited to Berlin to record the filming process by the director, Cynthia Beatt, for ten days. I shot the sound as they filmed and every evening I made a new piece from the day's rushes. We went to many locations around the invisible wall and its remains. For about an hour I was allowed to wander unsupervised and recorded whatever I wanted. This recording is an edited version of the master."
L@TE: Friday Night at BAM/PFA
July 26th, 2013
University of California Berkley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
"Locating"
Thingamajigs and Sasha Hom created 9 long vertical scrolls, at once musical score, artwork, poetry, and cartography that ascended the cavernous space, catalyzing the musical performances of three different improvising groups and transforming Gallery B into a collaborative map.
Group Three:
Kaori Suzuki - original hand built MEM analog synthesizer Marshall Trammell - percussion Zachary James Watkins - electronics.
Protests are under way in dozens of American cities, a week after George Zimmerman was cleared of murdering unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. This one was recorded in Hollywood.
Photograph: Peter Caldries
The remote Snaefellsness Peninsula in Iceland is home to the tallest structure in Western Europe. A transmitter built originally in 1963 as a long-range, low-frequency (LORAN-C) navigation system and now used for longwave public radio purposes.
During a recent sound recording trip to Iceland, i was fortunate enough to gain access to the transmitter facility and able to take a series of field recordings, using an array of contact microphones attached to the mast and supporting guy wires.
Several of these recordings were particularly arresting, capturing the structure as it radiated a myriad of constantly shifting harmonic progressions, in response to the hot Icelandic summer sun and strong icy winds blowing in from the nearby Snaefellsjkull glacier. These two extremes combined caused rapid expansions and contractions in the 200-700metre steel support wires and core mast, to produce a spiralling, ever-changing, kaleidoscopic drone.
Of particular note as well, during a quiet point in the recording, my microphones started to pick up the audio of the longwave radio transmission. A graceful violin solo for 3 minutes, before the sun broke through the clouds and caused the structural resonance of the mast to increase once more, drowning out the radio with a music of the structure's own making.
Particularly beautiful is the notion that there is an ever-changing and constantly-in-flux sound emanating from this structure; an unbroken music, in direct response to its environment, which has been playing in constant form for the last 50 years. The sounds captured here represent a snapshot in time taken on the 15th June 2013, the specifics of which have never been, and will never be, repeated.
Equipment: JRF C-series contact mics | Sound Devices 702 | Marantz PMD 661
Processing: Izotope RX | Max/MSP
With thanks to Jez Riley French and Chris Watson
Photograph: Peter Worth
Equipment used: 4 x Reson 4042 Hydrophones, rigged for MS recording, post-processed using Max/MSP; Nagra VI recorder.
Location: Placencia Bay, Belize.
Date: 13th December 2012.
Narrative:
After a long day of finicky experimentation in the sun, I returned to the bay to wash salt water from the equipment and to hose down. From 1630'37"N, 8822'1"W I looked out on a tranquil evening scene and decided to attempt one last recording.
I had recorded throughout the day in shallow coral seas off the coast of Belize. I'd attempted to capture a spatial impression of the clouds of clicks and pops produced by crustacea and who-knows-what; a sound present at almost every ocean location on Earth.
In the evening bay one boat was at anchor, a jet ski idled around and I saw a couple of tiny and distant fishing boats. Yet the underwater acoustic landscape was dense, quite different from the gentle evening scene that played out above the water.
I assembled this sequence of recordings to share my experiences of these two places. The recordings made among the shallow reefs are filled with crustacea sounds punctuated by communication calls between toadfish and an occasional dolphin.
Other impressions of this remote environment came to light when I auditioned the recordings back in the studio. The hydrophone rig became a barometer for other encounters. The tiniest brushings with what appeared to be fluffy fingers of soft coral revealed their harsh surface, rasping and gritty. As the evening currents shifted and strengthened "strumming" hydrophone cables conveyed the power of the underwater gales.
Many thanks to Francesca von Habsburg and the T-B A21 Academy for the opportunity to record in these places.
Unprocessed recordings of a 16 foot pipe organ - built 1861, standing in a 13/14th Century rural church in West Penwith, Cornwall), guitar feedback, unprocessed field recordings, ventilator and microtonal dubplates & turntables.
Field recordings from contained and reverberant spaces in the cities of Berlin (2007), Tokyo (2006), Sydney (1999), Milan (2008), Hamburg (2009) and Osaka (2006).
Live 8-channel diffusion at The Exchange, Penzance, Cornwall as a response to the exhibition "An Urban Silence" curated by Blair Todd. Diffusion through 8 Genelec 8040A monitors with 7070A & 7050B subwoofers courtesy of University College Falmouth/Dartington College & Rob Gawthrop.
Live room recording by Martin Clarke Mixed and mastered by Robert Curgenven
Equipment Used: Pearl MS-2 CL microphone outputting MS, matrixed in a Sound Devices SD302 mixer and recorded stereo to a Nagra BB+.
Location: Camp Forktail Creek just outside the Corbett Tiger Reserve near Ramnagar, Uttaranchal, Northern India.
Date: March/April 2009. [On a Wildeye trip to India with Chris Watson.]
Narrative: After our evening meal of vegetable curry which followed a long, bumpy day in the Corbett Tiger Reserve (looking for... tigers of course!), we settled down to the sound of distant thunder. Our hosts advised that we took shelter before the rain started and soon after the short walk to my hut the first spots were falling. Recording equipment was hurriedly set up under the veranda and my hut-mate and I settled down on deck-chairs. After only a very short wait, with skipper frogs calling from the nearby pond, the rain started. Very soon the only sound was of rain and distant thunder and everyone, even the monitor lizard that lived in the thatch of our roof, stayed put until the storm passed.
Photo: David Cowlard
Live at Silo 6, Auckland at the Audio Foundations Now! Here! Festival 12.08.12
A performance in one New Zealands most reverberant spaces, a complex of six disused cement silos on Aucklands waterfront. Harnessing their amazing acoustics, Stanier Black-Five made a series of initial field recordings within the silos, which were then re-introduced into the same space as the source material for this live performance. All the reverb is natural. No effects were used.
Stanier Black-Five is the New Zealand-based sound artist and writer, Jo Burzynska. Her audio work is largely based on the manipulation of her own environmental recordings and found sounds, which she uses to create dense soundscapes that use sources such as the pounding rhythms of trains to the sounds of the earthquakes that have recently shaken her city. She also creates multi-sensory installations that combine sound and taste.
Thanks to the Audio Foundation for hosting the event, David Hornblow & Shaun Collins for the live sound & Malcolm Riddoch for the mastering..
Photo: Jez Riley French
bower floor | dawn chorus with rain | canyon wires
music sits above and under the first impression. when duration allows these things come into focus, increasingly. in swifter moments a sense of quietude is possible. still, finding pace with listening as a lens, moving
recorded september 2012, during time spent following a residency at The Wired Lab, this piece begins with two recordings playing at the same time. One of a bower floor, with contact microphones and geophone (nb. some of these low frequencies will not be audible via computer speakers) alongside a dawn chorus amidst light rain - drops falling centimetres from a conventional stereo microphone. Towards the middle of the piece, a further contact microphone recording enters, revealing one of the most bizarre fence wire sounds i've yet managed to gather. Despite returning to the same stretch of canyon fence several times, this particular effect was only present on one occasion and lasted for around 10 minutes. My best guess is that humidity and the rising temperature combined to create a momentary, unrepeatable and extremely evocative effect on the wires. It is this infinite and unpredictable aspect to listening in situ that continues to fascinate me. Getting closer to and underneath the surface of environments and spaces is a constant revelation, a constant pleasure.
jrf c-series contact microphones | jrf prototype geophone | sanken cuw-180
thanks, always, to Maureen and Pheobe and to Sarah Last and Dave Burraston (The Wired Lab)
Photo: Zoe Drayton
Recorded at the Now! Here! Festival to celebrate the launch of the book "Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound in New Zealand".
Mastered by Rachel Shearer.
Thank you: Zoe Drayton, David Hornblow.
Photo: Sunouchi Motohiro
Touch's 30th Anniversary Event: A Sound Recording Weekend with Chris Watson. Recordings of the sea made at Sea Palling, Norfolk, 8th December 2012.
Photo: "The Only Known Photograph of Bruce Gilbert"
Recorded by Dirk Specht. With thanks to Anthony Moore. Touch.30 formed part of 'Nocturne' with Achim Mohn and Mike Harding.
Recording of post-tropical cyclone Sandy by Irene Moon in Brooklyn, New York, the night of 29th to 30th October 2012
Photo: Dave Knapik
Recorded at the Issue Project Room, Brooklyn in December 2011
ENOUGH!!! is Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Jason Lescalleet & Joachim Nordwall. Enough is Never Enough
Live room installation capture recording from October 2010 at SONM: Puertas de Castilla in Murcia, Spain.
A trio of identical speaker constructions were presented in a black box room, all fed with variations of a similar sonic bed to continuously run for a duration of 24 days.
Three cycles distilled here for this listen.
Lary 7 appeared as part of the Touch.30 Live in NYC events held by Issue Project Room in September 2012
Photo: Luc Vanhouke
Every month in 2012 we are recording a soundtrack at 12 different locations in the Westhoek, Belgium, where we live. We tried to find 12 places which have a meaning for us. Those places, sometimes are filled with history, sometimes with magick, have influenced us, losing or ego and creating sounds melting with the environment.
We are 6 months away; half W12.
JUNI12 has been recorded at 'Farms Hospital', between Vlamertinge and Elverdinge. It is an historical place with ancient history of death and war - Yves' playground when he was young, a place druids, a gathering point of nature sourced by its sounds of trees and birds.
The sound was made by fieldrecordings, french horn, violin, ancient bassdrum and manipulations.
) NOTHING IS TRUE / EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED (
Photo: Dave Knapik
The first in a series of Touch invites... held at Caf Oto on 17th July 2012.
Portrait by Stian Westerhus.
Recorded and mixed by Ernst Karel. Special thanks to C. Spencer Yeh and Non-Event: Susanna Bolle, Benjamin Nelson and Ernst Karel.
Live performance on pipe organ and synthesiser. Recorded at Cambridge Unitarian Church, Saturday 28 April 2012 by Norman Ipsmael using a Tascam DR-07. Thanks to Jo Brook/Bad Timing, Simon Scott, Norman Ipsmael and Benny Nilsen.
Photo: Daniel Menche
Live Performance on April 21st, 2012 at the YU Contemporary Art Center located in Portland, Oregon USA. This concert was a two hour non-stop performance and this recording only captured an hour and fifteen minutes due to a recording failing. The amplifiers also blew out at the end. The room in which this concert was performed was the size of a city block (68,000 ft/20726 m) and had enormous room acoustics with considerable natural reverberations. Maximum volume was used, for 120 bodies were present to absorb this 120 minute sonic mass.
"Boredom is tuneless matter. Tears are music in material form." (E.M. Cioran)
Photo: Mike Harding and Philip Marshall
VINYL+. live at ZKM, Karlsruhe 21st April 2012. Achim Mohn uses 3 omnitronic decks, Philip Jeck 2 Dancettes and sampler.
The resurgence of vinyl in recent years is a phenomenon which has not gone unnoticed; as CD declines sharply, its audio limitations exposed not only by advances in other technologies, but also by the myths propagated at the inception of digital exposed, so artists explore and demand other formats to express their work. Although a business model is still some way off the traditional artist label distribution shop paradigm, it is clear this is being radically overhauled and replaced by online sales platforms set up by the artists themselves. But vinyl seems to have escaped this process, and continues to grow. Why is that?
Recorded by Philip Marshall from desk to hard drive.
Photo: Mike Harding
Recorded live at Passionskirche, Berlin @ Spire Live, closing CTM12
Volume five in an ongoing series. Self-assembled and reversed in February 2012. Photography: Heitor Alvelos
Why not pay a humble tribute to the golden age of backmasking? Once upon a time, radio DJs would go up in flames accusing pop records of containing satanic messages woven backwards onto the groove. These would then supposedly make their way onto your teenage subconscious, and from its depths command you to do very bad things.
Echoes of the Altamont and Manson traumas aside, it was all a bit naive when compared to the magnitude of the very shady side of the entertainment industry nowadays, where worthwhile pop music once again becomes demonised: the recent, heavy policy proposals against online piracy, the terrorist-like shutdown of megaupload, the steamroller-like production-line of prime-time karaoke, the pervasive disgust of auto-tuning, the endless parade of cute iGadgets valiantly ignoring the abyss of over-consumption and worldwide economic meltdown.
Hubris, Icarus, Tower of Babel... Some say the future is once again in the local. Let's just forget all those un-local languages, then. Press play, unlearn them all, quickly and painlessly. Bliss.
Recorded live at Fim de Semana Especial n. 3, Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon, 27th January 2012 - with thanks to Pedro Santos.
Photo: Dave Knapik
On Invisible Pause, choreographed by Christopher Arouni, is part of Sknes Dansteater's performance HAZE, November 4th 2011 in Malm's Sknesdansteater. Mixed by Christopher Arouni, Christian Fennesz & Anders Myhrman
Photo: Mats Bcker.
Recorded in the belltower of St. Mary's Church, Walthamstow on 30th November 2011.
With thanks to Denis Hewitt and Ewan Marshall.
David Cleveland & Nigel Lister present... 1. 1902 Gaumont Cinematograph | 2. 1912 Gaumont Chrono | 3. 1914 Pathé (Home) Projector | 4. 1914 Krups Ernemann No. 1
6AM - Moonsickness - Nobah Sahibs - Deadend - Nachtmeer - Is - 23.2
"The Home Recordings is the extension on the recordings that were made in 2008 in Norway. Being there with no instruments and no source but water to create sound, I was very limited. Returning home, the place you love and when you stay too long, you hate, became the source of these recordings. Everyday you hear something that changes your mood, but sometimes they can be very difficult to record. This can be the cause of different, unwelcome sounds, as you think they are. so I started to record the sounds outside my front door from 04hr. in the morning till 07hr.
Mixing everything at home in some kind of dark way, not opening the sound up... I used an Emulator Emax 1 because of it's simple sampling sound. all other instruments are acousticly recorded."
there is no limit on sound, only we as source.
Philip Jeck in performance was recorded on 6th September 2011 at The Brucknerhaus, Linz, Austria for Prix Ars Electronica, at which Philip Jeck was awarded a Distinction for his LP 'Suite: Live in Liverpool' [Touch # Tone 29, 2009]. The multi-channel recording (2 channels off the desk, two in the room) was mixed for TouchRadio by BJNilsen.
The Ghost of Philip Jeck by Mike Harding
'Bee' is inspired by the microcosmos of insects, a world of intense energetic flying behaviour, and could be described as a 'journey on the back of a bee', since the piece metaphorically often places the listener in this imaginary position, as 'travelling' on the insect itself. The purpose of the piece is to evoke images or imaginary situations, and can be well described as a 'movie without the image', since the sound is strong enough to let us - the listeners- mould the visual aspect in our imagination... This work uses the language of electro-acoustic music, and is derived from the digital processing of natural sounds (mostly sounds of insects) in combination with electronic and synthesised sound material.
Bee received the Award of Distinction at the ARS ELECTRONICA 2011 International Competition on new media in the category Digital Musics and Sound Art.
Apostolos Loufopoulos works with sound and digital media and is interested in the sound of the natural world and its potential for musical exploration.
Photo: Mike Harding Location: Cavenham, Suffolk Conditions: 29th August was overcast, cool and very windy Recorded using 2 x dpa 4060s
With thanks to Sarah and Ralph Brownie, who at 20:07 put his foot over the entrances to the wasps' nest... (just for a short while).
Recordings from abandoned places:
- resonated wires, cans and other objects from an old run-of-the-river power plant, Sunnhordaland, Norway
- a singing floating bridge at fishing village, Hitra, Norway
Recordings from abandoned things:
- a violin amplified through a empty metal can
- recordings from inside plastic cans and bottles at the seaside
- from inside a pipe at Gasometer Schneberg
- a motor which worked for the last time and is now abandoned
Photo:
- reflections of an abandoned run-of-the-river power plant
Suite For String Quartet is written specifically for resonant spaces, interactive electronics, audience participation and string quartet. Suite for String Quartet has been in a continuous state of "revision" since Christmas 2004. In 2006, I developed a new tuning for all 16 strings. Each string of the quartet is retuned to an odd number partial of 60Hz. For this current version performed on May 1st, 2011 as part of the Second Annual May Day! New Music Marathon in Seattle, WA the entire first movement was rewritten.
Brad Hawkins, Cello Eyvind Kang, Viola Paris Hurley, Violin Brandon Vance, Violin Zachary James Watkins, Electronics
A few years ago, I had the chance to participate in the organization of a scientific seminar about the relationship between canids and humans, the conferences spreading between ecology, ethology, psychology and anthropology ("Entre Chiens Et Loups", Lyon, 2006). Amongst the invited scientists was Dave Mech a wildlife biologist who spent all his life studying wolves in the field, and in particular on Ellesmere Island located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
We drove together to visit an area in Lozre, the least populated department of France, where some wolves are kept in in semi-captivity, which means that they are living an unusually large enclosure. Those animals were originally rescued from poachers, and the park has a very good reputation for introducing them to the public. There I could observe the wolves in the company of Dave Mech, who provided some invaluable insight into their behaviour.
Last year, I went back again to visit the wolves with Sylvain Macchi who is in charge of the park. I was able to record the songs of the wolves in the middle of the night and the early morning one February during their mating season. The barks are often associated with aggressive behaviours, meanwhile the chantings are a way to reinforce the cohesion of the group and calm down the tensions. The effect of these sounds, listening to wolves chanting in the complete darkness, is an extreme experience. Those arch-shaped tones are amongst the most beautiful things one can hear from the animal kingdom.
Composed in May 2011. Field recordings mostly made in February 2010.
Thanks a lot to Dave Mech for the inspiration and Sylvain Macchi for introducing me to the wolves of Gevaudan.
www.kalerne.net
- At Half Past 3
- Nice to See You / Dunderhead
- On The Difficulty - reading Perec
- for Fred
Recorded by Elizabet van der Kooij at The Tapeworm Comes Alive! Theater Kikker, Utrecht 28.xi.10. With thanks to Le Guess Who? and PAUME.
Field recordings of wild fennel, pine trees and thistle near Davis, California. Additional sounds include multiple layers of a running hard drive and a thistle on a turntable. Recorded using an Edirol R9, contact microphones and induction coil microphones.
Alex Halsted is a fish. Specifically, the Gnathonemus Petersii is an Elephantnose fish native to the Niger River in West and Central Africa. The fish has very poor eyesight and emits a weak electrical field from electro receptors covering its body. These receptors allow the fish to send a sonar-like electric pulse similar to the bats use of echolocation.
On 24 September 2009, David More, a sound artist who creates sound works by harnessing variations from the fishs electric field, and I, executed experiments using the frequencies created by the fish as white noise to record for Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and additional energy provided by Heidi Harman using Reiki.
The EVPs captured were not only very strong, but they seem to also refer to the fish, to David and also in some cases seem to refer to itself as the fish. Is it possible that disincarnate entities taping into available frequencies to communicate also pick up personality or other energies that define the identity of the being its taping into?
Included in this adaptation is a previously unreleased composition created using the frequencies of the fish as well as the EVPs captured and separately, the EVPs captured during those trials.
Whatever the physics of the phenomena are from those experiments, one thing we are sure of: Alex Halsted is a fish.
Cover photograph and treatment: Heidi Harman (2009)
Recorded live at The Rymer Audorium, Music Research Centre, York on 17th December 2010 by Tony Myatt.
- Zound Delta (21:52)
- Bells & Timps (5:30)
- BuchBel (11:54)
Zound Delta was made at a residency with the European Sound Delta Project in 2009. The sounds were recorded from the mouth of the Danube River at the Black Sea, - to about 200km upstream, at Russe Bulgaria. In Russe, there was a festival, and the finished piece was played. There were boats (Belgian barges outfitted as living boats) starting at the mouth of the Danube and the Rhine Rivers, with changing residents, for several months.
Bells and Timps was made using church bells in Gent Belgium, recorded by Godfried Willem Raes of Logos Foundation, in 1986. I modified the time by stretching vastly, and some changes in pitch as well.
BuchBel was recorded during an overnight train ride from Bucharest to Belgrade. All sounds are from the train, with many layerings. The train trip was immediately after the festival in Russe, Bulgaria, in 2009.
All of the pieces were made in ProTools.
Solo saxophone performance inside abandoned seaplane hangar, Tallinn harbour, Estonia.
Recorded by John Grzinich, May 29 2010, at the introduction event for Tuned City Tallinn 2011.
Recorded from the desk, live at Corsica Studios, London, on 1st July 2010. With thanks to Tom Relleen.
Ian R. MacLeod reads the short story "Well-Loved" from his collection "Past Magic" (PS Publishing, 2006).
During 2008/9 while working as a sound recordist for BBC Radio 4 Natural History Unit, sound recordist and composer Dr. Tom Lawrence spent six months recording and documenting the sounds above and below the waves of Lough Neagh, the largest water-mass in the British Isles. This programme is a compelling audio-log of those recordings, featuring breath-taking underwater sounds of beetles, frogs, eels, fish and other life. The programme also presents sounds above the water including migratory birds, industry and evocative soundscapes of forestry and the elements.
Recorded and produced by Tom Lawrence
Equipment: SQN Mixer, DPA Hydrophone, DPA omni-directional mics, SD702 recorder, Sennheiser M-S rig, Neuman 82, contact mics (piezos).
Imaginary Hospital Radio mimics and subverts conventional hospital radio and its aim to relieve its listeners/patients through the collaging and dissecting of the visceral and surgical sounds associated with illness and disease. The hospitals unwanted sounds and noise provide an unexpected artistic source, as a kind of sonic tableau an invisible operating theatre in which the sonic/audio auscultation/surgery occurs live to ear.
Richard Crow is an inter-disciplinary artist with a strong background in experimental audio work, photo based media, live performance and site-specific installation. He utilises sound and noise in a performative way, for its spatial and subjective qualities and above all for its psycho-physical implications for the listener. Over the past two decades his solo and collaborative site-specific installations and performances have consisted of highly conceptualised interventions into base materiality, investigations of alternative systems of organisation and research into a certain material decadence, most notably with the project The Institution of Rot.
Crow has collaborated, performed, and recorded with many leading musicians and sonic artists including Joe Banks, Adam Bohman, The Hafler Trio, Clive Graham, Michael Prime, Dean Roberts, Kaffe Matthews, Michael Morley, Sandoz Lab Techinicians, & dy'na:mo.
Live zoning and droning trance meditative exploratory improvised music is created by:
Mario Radinovic (Oscillators and multiple effects units) is a London-based musician with a keen interest in frequencies and their effect on human body and mind. Past few years he played with "Break Ups", and art band that eventually broke up, followed by "Oscillosonics". For many years Mario has been occasionally sonically collaborating with Kaffe Matthews, and Iris Garrelfs.
Howard Jacques (Melodica, singing, percussion and electronics) is a musician interested in surreal terrain. Other bands played in include Put Put, The Topsy Turvy Band, Proxy Music, Comfy Moss, Almost Real &c. He Produces The Bermuda Triangle Testtransmission Broadcasts for Resonance104.4FM, a London community arts radio station.
Chris Watson journeys to the South Pole for the David Attenborough series, The Frozen Planet (BBC, 2011). Here he reports back with his experiences...
Photos by Chris Watson & Jason Roberts
This concert was part of Todaysart, Den Haag, Netherlands on 27.09.09. Also appearing as part of the Touch events were Hildur Gudnadottir, Philip Jeck, Jana Winderen and The Eternal Chord. It was recorded straight from the mixing desk to an Ares Pll Nagra digital recorder.
Born in Tromso (Norway), Geir Jenssen is better known as Biosphere, a key figure in contemporary Norwegian music. In 1992, Jenssen shot to fame with his Biosphere-debut album "Microgravity", becoming one of the pioneering ambient artists from the 90's. He was one of the first to come up with the mix of soundscapes, voice samples and atmospheric noise with trancey melodies and solid beats. Biosphere gave an intimate performance in the Lutherse Kerk, a very small church.
Eighty miles off the coast of mainland Scotland, the archipelago of St Kilda is host to almost a million seabirds each summer. Beginning underwater, this journey takes in the remote island group with its gurgling seawash, gannets and storm petrel before sailing east to the Shiants, home to puffins, guillemots, fulmars and razorbills. Finally, a mix of the exotic and commonplace Carrion crow, wren, herring gulls. heron, ringed plover, cuckoo, oystercatcher, song thrush, common sandpiper heard at dawn on the island of Rhona. Sound and photography: Pascal Wyse and Tom Haines. Recorded in June 2009 with Dolphin Ear hydrophones, Sennheiser and DPA microphones and Sound Devices recorders.
1 / f noise
While teaching sound art in Cincinnati Ohio's art school DAAP, Montgomery organized sonic tours of the Ceramics Department. The audience was blindfolded and led one by one down 8 flights of stairs into a series of listening stations where ventilators, burning kilns and other machinery were in use (2008).
Smoothing Out The Press was composed using the Sound of Sanding from the Crest Hardware Show plus recordings made at Ben Owen's Middle Press in Brooklyn while printing the Ministry of Laminations Almost Blank Notebook letterpress edition (2007).
Biking in Holland | Tears (Sohrab version) | Tanhayi | Satyr | Tears (Esteban Olenikov version Tundra) | There is an ashtray between us | Tears (Yozhik version) | New Zealand | Barf
Recorded and played live in October 2009. Sohrab used reason3 his midi controller (R)evolution uc-16 and a sampler, recorded live through ambrosia recording software.
Xinjiang ("new frontier" in Chinese) or Eastern Turkestan is without doubt the first extremely sensitive zone in China, at least in terms of ethnic conflict between the Hans newcomers and muslim minorities who have a longer history of occupation of those areas. Spread from Mongolia to Afghanistan, it is the biggest Chinese province. I was in the north western part of Xinjiang in the prefecture of ILI, called Yining outside of China and Ghulja by the Turkophones, in May and June 2009...
Rehearsal tapes from The Suffolk Symphony.
On August 22nd 2009 Touch will present a multimedia perfomance of The Suffolk Symphony - the culmination of the week's work undertaken during the residency.
Faster than Sound comes to the Snape Proms for more experiments in sound and image.
Faster Than Sound bring more imaginative experiments with sound and image to the Snape Proms with The Suffolk Symphony, a specially commissioned residency and new work by leading sonic and visual production company Touch. Inspired by the historic coastline of Aldeburgh and its surrounding area including Aldeburgh Music's Snape Proms and its history, Touch will create a new audio-visual symphony from scratch, using only locally sourced sounds and images. Beginning on 16 August, Philip Jeck, BJNilsen, Jon Wozencroft, Philip Marshall and Mike Harding will go on a week-long treasure hunt to unearth old records, field recordings, home-made sounds and images to create a new multimedia Suffolk Symphony, culminating in its first performance on the 22 August.
Nacre was composed for the experimental music festival 'Skanu mezs' in Riga, Latvia. The premiere of Nacre was held there on 23rd May 2009 in St. Saviour's Anglican Church. [With thanks to Viestarts Gailitis.]
For a church organ and light organ
Composed by Hildur Gunadttir Performed by Charles Matthews and Hildur Gunadttir Installation by Eln Hansdttir and Hildur Gunadttir Light organ programmed by Derek Holzer
Nacre is dedicated to Hildur's grandmother Margrt Gunadttir, who celebrated her 80th birthday in July 2009.
The title refers to her name, since both the noun 'Nacre' and the name 'Margrt' mean 'Mother of Pearl'.
Nacre is a written for 2 types of organs; a church organ and a light organ, therefore the score is twofold.
- Church Organ/DNA:
Nacre's score is in the shape of a 360 degree helix of a double strand DNA. This form was chosen as a connection to Margrt's passionate work as a virologist. DNA forms the basis of inheritance in all organisms, except viruses, although DNA can be found in a few viruses such as herpes. DNA also connects grandmother and granddaughter, whereas it holds genetic information to be passed on from one generation to the next.
- Light Organ/Newton:
The basis of the light organ is Newton's color circle. He was the first person to connect colour to wavelengths of light and made the colour circle based on that theory. His circle consists of 7 colours and he assigned musical notes to each colour. Newton's scale starts with red, to which he assigned the note D. The scale continues as a diatonic scale from D (also known as the Dorian mode); E=orange, F=yellow etc.
A light system was made specially for Nacre, which reads the frequencies being played on the church organ and triggers coloured lights for each note in Newton's color circle. When the note D is played on the organ, for example, a red light shines in the light organ.
The light organ hangs above the audience. 70 LED lights are arranged in mirror-origami modules that are held up by giant balloons. The floating lights are therefore multiplied and create a slight spatial distortion.
Score/Performance:
The 21 angstrm width of the DNA is divided into 3 sets of Newton's 7 colour circle. Each set of colours are played on different manuals of the organ; one set is played on the pedals, another set is played on the 1st manual and the third set is played on the 2nd manual.
The 34 angstrm length of the DNA serves as a timeline for Nacre.
The form of the DNA determines when each note should be played. When the DNA rises or falls to a note in Nacre's score, it should be played until the DNA rises or falls on the same note, then the note is released. All the notes are indicated in the score with corresponding colours lighting up in the color organ. The result of this is a giant chord, where the overtones engage in a war as to which note shines the brightest in the light organ.
Newton's colour circle is also spread horizontally over the length of the DNA, starting at red with low frequencies and working its way up the frequency scale up to purple.
The "musical colours" of the chord are controlled by the 2nd performer next to the organist, who pulls or pushes the church organ stops in and out, creating an overtone resonance beat according to the horizontal colour circle. Starting with the lower stops and slower beat, working its way up to the higher stops and faster beat.
Mike Harding was commissioned by The Southbank Centre to record bees for The Bee Symphony, to be performed on Sunday 6th September 2009 at The Queen Elizabeth Hall, London as part of Pestival. The Bee Symphony, with music composition by Marcus Davidson (Spire) and bee recordings by Mike Harding diffused by Chris Watson, will be performed at Cross Pollination An Evening of Experimental Insect Music, curated by Chris Watson.
The recordings took place at Cherry Garden Farm, Stelling Minnis in Kent, England. The hives are owned by Olivia Grove on her seven acre small-holding. Also present were Marcus Davidson, who took the photos, and bee expert Mary Hill from Old Wives Lees. You can hear the voices of all four on the episode...
Equipment used includes 2 x dpa 4060 mics, recording onto a Nagra Ares P-ll at 48k 24bit, and of course, a coathanger and bee suit... with thanks to Jane Beese at The Southbank Centre.
Recorded 02.04.09
R'Occult 'n' Roll Music and Magic on the Wild Side Readings by Sandy Robertson and Edwin Pouncey at Treadwell's Books, London.
The connections between rock music and the occult range from the legends of bluesmen selling their souls to the Devil for success, through to the influence of Aleister Crowley on the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the 60s and 70s, and the Satanic music and imagery of todays Black Metal underground. This talk will cover all these subjects, together with lesser-known examples of rockultism. You may even get to hear some mad, bad and occasionally dangerous musick too. Earplugs optional.
Sandy Robertson is the author of The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook (now in print for 20 years) and has written for Mojo, NME and other publications. As well as being a music writer and illustrator for The Wire magazine, Edwin Pouncey (aka Savage Pencil/Sav X) is an artist whose work has been shown in galleries in the UK, Europe and America. Sandy Robertson and Edwin Pouncey were colleagues at the legendary rock paper Sounds during the 80s.
In this excerpt, Edwin Pouncey discusses the genealogy of Black Metal.
guest: Carlos Santos
Recorded 12.12.08 Dome of the National Pantheon, Lisbon
Joo Silva: crystal bowl Paulo Raposo: space multi-channel diffusion and real-time processing Carlos Santos: glass and bell
"Book of Hours" was recorded in the remarkable baroque central dome of the National Pantheon in Lisbon.
The musicians (and the audience) were 40 meters above ground level on a narrow circular balcony looking out over the abyss. The main sound source was a crystal bowl, played by Joo Silva, which was struck and resonated with a stick. Paulo Raposo processed these sounds and diffused them throughout the space via 6 channels, 4 of which were small self-powered speakers, arranged symetrically around the circumference of the dome. Carlos Santos also moved throughout the space and the audience with a small glass and a Tibetan bell.
The sonic interactions in "Book of Hours" aimed to reveal the inherently active qualities of the space, itself a performer in this acoustic dialog.
An edited version of the track "Ghost", commissioned as part of "The Space Between Seeing and Knowing is Haunted," an exhibition curated by DL Alvarez at Exile and Arratia, Beer, Berlin [07.02.2009 04.04.2009]. Arranged and produced by Philip Marshall. Voices sourced from "The Ghost Orchid an Introduction to EVP" [PARC, 1999]. Rain recordings courtesy of Dale Cornish.
How to catch a truffle
Ancient Greeks, as much in the dark as anyone else when it came to where the white truffle is to be found, shrugged and announced that the tuber magnatum occurred wherever lightning struck the ground. Cobblers, of course, but thats the excuse for beginning this piece with a burgeoning thunder storm in September 2008, on the Barbialla Nuova estate near San Miniato, Tuscany. This is an area famed for its white truffles.
Then a truffle hunt, with Imperio, Bobbi and Sabali. Bobbi is a dog, a breed called Lagotto. Imperio is the hunter. Sabali translates Imperio now and again, but most of the time he is chatting to the dog, saying Find!, Is it or isnt it? He gets very angry with the cat (Go home!) who, feeling sociable, joined us on this three-hour walk.
A truffle is found and Bobbi, having pulled up a 12-inches of earth, doesn't want to surrender it. At least with a dog you can yank him away by the scruff of the neck, and Bobbi was occasionally seen flying over Imperios shoulder. Not so easy with pigs, who used to be employed as truffle hunters but enough of an excuse to include the sounds of Silvio here, the biggest of the farm's Cinta Senese breed.
There the tenuous links end, unless anyone knows of a connection between truffles and the crickets, tawny owls and mystery birds that chattered deep in to the night.
[Recorded on DPA miniature omni microphones and Sound Devices 702 recorder]
A submarine-like structure sits on a traffic island in the middle of Akerman Road, London SW9. It was built in the 1970s above the large underground boiler room that provides heat for the Myatts Field estates, which lie on either side of the road. The boilers still heat more than 300 buildings to the south of the road, but their unreliability caused the north-side estate to switch to another heating source in the early 1990s. The heating system was sited underground because to do so was considered best practice at this stage of the Cold War, when a nuclear conflict sometimes seemed a distinct possibility. At the time the estates were built, both the US and the USSR maintained large fleets of weapon-bearing submarines: ocean-going doubles of the Akerman Road structure. In spring 2008 I made some recordings of the machinery in the boiler room. These have been organised into a composition. I have filtered some of the sounds but no digital processing has been used.
Photography by Dollan Cannell.
Thanks to Stuart Dixon and Lambeth council for letting me in.
freq_out 7 took place in September 2008 as part of The Happy New Ears Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium. There was also a performance by THE FREQ_OUT ORCHESTRA on Saturday 13th September, which was recorded by Finnbogi Ptursson and mastered by BJNilsen.
Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/48 with a Rode NT4 stereo mic.
The forests and meadows of Northern Arizona's high country are populated by herds of elk, packs of coyotes and a variety of frogs, owls and other wildlife. Camping out overnight can be an exhilarating acoustic experience - as I found out...
Waking up in my tent just after one am my immediate thought was that I had entered some weird spirit realm and was hearing the wail of a banshee - what turned out to be a bugling elk. The initial recordings were made on 4th September 2007. The main portion of the recording, an ethereal song consisting of a series of explosive elk calls, was made more recently on 10th June 2008.
"The earliest tape used in this radio show comes from 1982 and the most recent is ten years old. AER is/was a name I gave to sound recordings used for the Touch samplers (in particular) and this is no more than an opportunity to clear the cupboards and make the best of them available in one location. None of them benefit from studio production and in the age of easily-available sound recording software, I suppose part of the point is that they are all cassette or minidisk recordings assembled on pre-digital recording equipment."
Donadea Forest Recordings, December 2007 to May 2008.
00:00-04:27 Castle Crow's Cacophony (31st December 2007, 7.20am) 04:28-10:23 January Gales 9th January 2008 10.45pm (contains references to 9/11 forest monument and the avenue of trees, captured with contact mics) 10:24-14:48 Forest Rain 12th January 2008 1.15am (extensive flooding) 14:49-20:36 Forest Harmonics 8th March 2008 6.20-11.50am (sampled forest chimes, forestry felling, and the 'carbon chorus' [surrounding motorways]). 20:37-30:47 The Dawn Chorus (recorded on National Dawn Chorus Day 20th May 2008, 4.35am)
Tom Lawrence is a composer/sound recordist. He is on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dublin City University.
Principle photography by Eddie Mallin from Dublin, currently living in Kildare. Using film-based cameras, he prints using traditional darkroom techniques and favours fibre-based papers. Images for this project are mainly scanned negatives.
Supplementary photography captured during recording sessions by Tom Lawrence.
These recordings were made using a Sennheiser mkh20 binaural rig, a Neumann kmr82, contact microphones, a hydrophone, a Sony C1 and a Sound Devices mixer and recorder.
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Lindsay Anderson recorded at the memorial service for Andrei Tarkovsky [1932-1986] at St. James's Church, Piccadilly, London
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Filming The Garden [Derek Jarman, 1990] at Dungeness, Kent.
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Mrs. Oyler in conversation with Derek Jarman
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Brick Lane Man, 1988
As part of an ongoing series of recordings of unusual sounds of the Venice lagoon, these tracks were made on 29th april 2008 at 2100 in a night-depot of boats of the public transport service at Riva dei Schiavoni, not far from San Marco square.
Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/96, with binaural stereo mic.
"Sapientum super acquis" is the title attribuited to the "Magistrato alle acque" of the Serenissima Venetian Republic, an organ istituited on 1501 by the "Council of ten", that had the job of keeping safe the delicate natural/artificial balance of the lagoon, and looking after the "health" of the water.
Today the water is mostly polluted because of Porto Marghera, one of the biggest industrial areas in the whole Europe.
Recorded, assembled and produced by Novi_sad, March 2008. Mastered by Electroware and Novi_sad at Dsp Lab, Athens
The whole piece is based on field recordings from:
Mamori Lake, Amazonia, Brazil Alphios Bridge, Ancient Olympia, Greece Vibrations from the bridge which connects Denmark with Sweden The Heineken Brewery, Greece
and hydrophone recordings* from Mamori Lake.
Also use were sounds and notes from a church organ.
Output signals have been manipulated and electronically treated.
Dramazon is made in memory of a long rainy night in Amsterdam...
In the era of 0111001100011101011o, one thing remains stable and it will remain stable and non-mutated for eternity. The way people kiss, the way bodies are connected...
[*thanx to Scott Konzelmann]
Latitude: 61 2 Min. 12 Sec. Longitude: 4 36 Min. 36 Sec.
Name: Utvr Light Nearest Town or City: Hardbakke, Norway Location: About 4 miles west of Ytre Sula. Managing Organization: Coast Directorate Tower Height: 101 Height of Focal Plane: 148 Characteristic and Range: White flash every 30 seconds; range 19 nautical miles. Description of Tower: Red round cast-iron tower.
This light is operational
Date Established: 1900 Date Present Tower Built: 1900
Current Use: Active aid to navigation. Open To Public? Yes.
It was last July, summer 2007, we went to a party at Laugarvatn, one of the few places where there grow natural trees in Iceland, approximately one hours drive east of Reykjavik. The party was good and went far into the bright night but we had put up a tent to lie down in the morning. I wasn't at all tired in the morning but started listening to the incredible birds in the woods and down in the mob until day broke. I was sorry not to have the recording machine with me that night but decided to return the night after with my gear, hoping the birds would still be there. They were and this time I was alone in the place, did but up a small mic and pressed the rec. button, the result is on the Touch Radio.
A commissioned sound installation for the Hole In The Sky festival in Bergen, Norway August 21-25th 2007. The installation was made using six channels. This is an edit/simplified stereo mix made for Touch Radio. " Into The Pandemonium" is a de-composition/ celebration of 25 years of extreme metal music. Fragments of classic moments in death/thrash/black metal music have been mangled, disfigured and reworked into a festering pulp of distortion, doom and noise.
Saligo Bay sits in the nw corner of the Island of Islay in the Scottish Hebrides. Atlantic waves break on the shore and westerly winds drive straight up the beach and create mosaic patterns of sound in the low-lying vegetation. 'The Sound of Islay' then waits for the winds to die and the sun to dip into the ocean before investigating the nocturnal sounds on the wetlands of Loch Gruinart.
"'9-sided room' was created in May 2007 by layering 9 sides from some of the vinyl I've released over the years. it is basically what would happen if I had 9 turntables in my studio and was able to play these records all at the same time. There's a bit of mixing things in and out but no processing or manipulation. Along with some recent things, I've included the very first record I ever made - a 6" cardboard recording from a phono booth machine at a Los Angeles amusement park c. 1969. '9-sided room' is intended to be heard at a relatively low volume."
'Silver' was conceived for TouchRadio as part of their 25th anniversary.
As a starting point, electronic sounds were created using a malfunctioning Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 synth, recorded in 5 improvised passes of 25 minutes each - 5x5=25. The title also reflects this, silver being the material that denotes a 25th anniversary. Field recordings were made in Thailand and New Zealand over December 2006 and incorporated into the sonic jamboree - the piercing, feedback like tone at the start is the actual sound of cicadas in the Thai sub-tropical rainforest, untreated, the sound they produce as individuals synchronizing every 60/90 seconds to produce almost a pure sine wave. Further on is the dawn chorus in Wellington, New Zealand with the distinctive, clacking call of a bird called a Tui sounding out. Close to the end of the piece is the singing of a young Thai lad, sat around the neck of an elephant as we both rode into the rainforest, 'home' never too far away for me as he was wearing a t-shirt on the back of which was printed the front page of a US newspaper from 1979 announcing the death of Sid Vicious!
Recordings made with an Edirol R-09 and Soundman binaural, in-ear microphones..
Recorded at iDEAL Noise Fest, Stockholm. On this occasion, The Skull Defekts were Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Henrik Rylander, Joachim Nordwall and Jean-Louis Huhta.
These 'fragments' were constructed for TouchRadio throughout 2006... Daniel Menche says: "Sound of Vehemence!" Music is like one's own blood, so amplify it! As loud as possible - make the speakers bleed!"
Performed in a garden at the top of a hill in Foz Coa, at the remote northeast of Portugal. Overlooking the valley and the far slope of the opposite hill, at dusk, Pita, Fennesz (computers) and Rafael Toral (modular synth) played as Joo Paulo Feliciano mixed live into a sound-modulated light generating cube. The scale of the cube, the throbbing, rich colors emanating from it and the electronics setting gave the event an otherwordly feel, pretty much as if an alien spaceship had landed there.
"The Alcedo Volcano sits, astride the equator 1000m above the Pacific ocean on the central ridge of Isla Isabella the largest of the Galapagos Islands. For tens of thousands of years within the micro climate of the Caldero a strange and beautiful habitat has been created - an isolated and lost world which I was privileged to live within for several days during May 2006." Chris Watson, June 2006
'CD=text (psycho-acoustical speech)' was recorded in different cities with different friends, inspired by other notions of sampling technology and the remix-format, and the dynamics of mishearing.
Special thanks to Lupe Nuez-Fernandez, Ken Ehrlich, Giles Lane, and Lun*na Menoh for their participation.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer working with sound, location, and performance. His ongoing project to build a library of radio memories, "Phantom Radio", will be presented this autumn as part of Radio Revolten, Halle Germany. He lives in Copenhagen and is a member of freq_out.
This piece is solely based on Hydrophone recordings, made by Jana Winderen in Berlin, Mjsa, Halifax (Canada) and Oslo. With thanks to Doug Quin, samples of whose work also were used in this piece.
[Recorded in Stockholm by BJNilsen on the 13th anniversary of the founding of Ash International. Also performing that night were Alvars Orkester, Elgaland-Vargaland, BJNilsen and OCSID.]
Jana Winderen is an artist, curator and producer who lives and works in Oslo, Norway. She is a member of freq_out.
'Radio One' is a live recording from the premiere performance of 'Radioland', played on September 24, 2005 during the EMF Festival at Igreja de Santiago, a 15th century chapel in Palmela, Portugal. 'Radioland' is based on live radio input re-arranged by Stephan's computer. The original 6-channel diffusion is presented here as a stereo mixdown. The piece is dedicated to Vitor Joaquim.
Press conference/panel at Roskilde Festival 010705
Panelists consisted of Ivar & Grutle (of the Norwegian group ENSLAVED), Stephen O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi & Attila Csihar (all of whom had performed with SUNN O))) that day), and Aaron Turner of ISIS.
Leif Inge - Naeae...
Leif Inge is an Oslo-based idea-based artist, working with time-stretching sound to create beautiful, but thrilling and powerful, soundscapes. As in his epic 9 Beet Stretch, 24 hour long concerts with time-stretched 9th symphony by Beethoven, the work featured here is a granulated piece of sound sculpture made on the superb CLM software by Bill Schottsteadt
Jacob Kirkegaard - Eldfjall Live at Observatori Festival, Valencia:
"The sounds I here perform with were recorded in two ways: with an acoustic microphone and with an accelerometer. For the acoustic recordings I used a Sanken CSS-5 which I held very closely to the tiny bubbling surface. The accelerometer was inserted approximately 4 cm into the earth and picked up a denser timbre than the acoustic microphone. As opposed to the Eldfjall CD release (where I chose to let the sounds stand by themselves), I here mixed the different sounds with each other to create a more organic sound and a narrative. I began the concert with creaking ice from different lakes in Iceland. These were also recorded with accelerometers. None of the sounds have been processed."
Devolution/Evolution: Stephen O'Malley interviews Dylan Carlson: "Last August I was invited by the american metal magazine, Decibel, to interview Dylan Carlson for a regular feature they call "Under the Influence". The idea of the feature is basically musicians interviewing their main inspirators from the prior time, or something. Although this could be a bit silly and demeaning, Dylan and I have become friendly over the past few years and we both thought it would be a fun opportunity to talk shop and have this published! I can't count the number of times we have been nerding out over tube talk, guitars etc... which is almost the result of this piece. The editor of this said mag agreed to handle the transcription, so I added some initially Ambarchi-inspired bass waves to the recording in order to increase the pressure and atmosphere for the sorry intern who inherited the work. The feature ran with a ridiculous editorial introduction recently, but I think the recording itself turned into a gem of interest. The most memorable part of the conversation included categorization of guitar models by religious persuasion, and speech metal as an athletic event. This marked the second time I interviewed Dylan formally, the first time being in 1993 for a fanzine I had at the time (which remains unpublished, I have the tape somewhere)."
People Like Us - The Bits In Between: From the digital gutter, here lie all the soundbytes edited out of mic breaks for People Like Us's radio show DO or DIY on WFMU from June to September 2005. The show is all about cutting together avant with pop, and the only aspect of this one hour a week that has ever felt slightly out of place has been the necessary mic breaks. So now we do them justice by taking the entire unedited 3 hours, and in Language Removal Service style we take out all the meaning and are left with 34 minutes of delicious background noise, voice glitches and hesitations.
KK.NULL - [Radio-Animus/Anima] for TouchRadio:
Track 1 - Radio-Animus (composition/improvisation with electronics + voice) 23:32 Track 2 - Radio-Anima 1 (improvisation with a piece of metal) 04:49 Track 3 - Radio-Anima 2 (improvisation with a piece of metal + voice) 04:10
All tracks were recorded live at Super Deluxe, Tokyo, June 15, 2005. Final production at prima natura studio, August 30, 2005. Performed + produced by Kazuyuki Kishino (KK.NULL).
Peter Rehberg - Paris Qui Dort - Recorded live at Centre Pompidou, Paris 11.09.2004:
"In June 2004 I was asked by Cinemix to perform a live score to the silent movie 'Paris Qui Dort' (directed by Ren Clair in 1923) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on September 11th of that year. 'Paris Qui Dort' ('Paris Asleep', or as the English version of the film is known: 'The Invisible Ray') was not only Ren Clair's first film but the first film to investigate the theme of the 'deserted city'. The night watchman on the Eiffel Tower comes off his shift to find people all over Paris frozen in motion. Eventually he meets a group of unfrozen people who arrived that morning on a plane. The group enjoys the luxury of the city, dining in restaurants and taking jewelry as they want, however boredom soon sets in and the men fight over the woman. Eventually they receive a radio message directing them to come to a particular address. There a scientist tells them how he invented a ray that has frozen the whole city. They were unaffected because the Eiffel Tower and plane were out of the rays range.
And so on.....
This is the recording of that live score."
Toshiya Tsunoda - Appearance of physical vibration:
These recordings are studies of the sonic effects of physical vibration
Track 1 - high frequency on a plate glass - 05:46 "Seven piezo ceramic discs are connected with an sine wave generator - and the discs are on a plate glass. Same frequency is output to the piezo discs The frequency shifts slowly and continuously from 9000hz to 20000hz. Due to this, you can listen various sounds made by high-speed cyclic contact between piezo disc and a plate glass, like a ball dribbles. This recording is a private live performance at my room." Track 2 - top of amplitude - 08:25 "I detected the top and bottom of the amplitude from a certain audio signal by a precious gate device. L channel is top (plus level), R channel is bottom (minus level)." Track 3 - on electromagnetic siren - 05:26 "Output an audio signal to the coil of an 100hz electromagnetic siren. The electromagnetic siren vibrates, so you can listen to the amplitude changes according to an audio signal on R channel. L channel, connected by an electrical wire to small metal reeds on the siren which acts like a switch to transmit any vibration from the coil. You can listen intermittently to any change in the vibration. In this work, there are two ways of description; the R channel is continual or linear, the L channel is intermit or dotted."
["The audio signals of tracks 2 and 3 are field recordings source material - environmental sounds from the suburbs. Track 2 was recorded by me, in Fukada-dai, Yokosuka City, Japan, c. 1997. Track 3 was recorded by Steve Roden somewhere in California. Track 3 was made for Steve Roden's installation project several years before which was held in a certain museum of California.
This material has not been released on any recording media."
Philip Jeck - from the archives:
Track 1 - Wholesome Sunday (A live mix from the 2004 Mor festival, Ireland 22.08.04) 9:20 Track 2 - In Loving Memory: Walter Gibbons and Arthur Russell (Originally recorded for the TRACE CD, Audio Research Editions, ARECD102, Liverpool, 1999) 2:04 Track 3 - Nelson Surfs [from Touch Sampler 2, 1997] 6:33 Track 4 - 16/17 Rehearsal [from Touch Sampler 3, 1999] 8:18 Track 5 - As My Shadow Passes... [from Touch Sampler 00, 2000] 9:37
and a special bonus - 12:00
Extracts from the live soundtrack "Instructions for Survival", a dance production choreographed and danced by Charlie Morrisey & Scott Smith on 3rd February 2005 at the Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome. Recent performances were held at the Linbury Theatre, Opera House, Covent Garden, London on 22nd and 23rd July 2005.
Track 1 - Instructions for Survival 1 5:59 Track 2 - Instructions for Survival 2 6:33
Chris Watson - The Galapagos Islands - An Audio Diary: Recorded in April 2005 on The Galapagos Islands, 1000km off the west coast of Ecuador...
Chris Watson was out in the Galapagos Islands recording for a forthcoming tv film series. In particular Chris made a series of recordings throughout the unique and highly specialised Galapagos habitats; from the mist shrouded Miconia zone at the higher altitudes of Santa Cruz down to the dense cactus and thorn scrub bordering the coast on smaller uninhabited islands. This trip was also the first opportunity for Chris to try out location surround sound recording both on land and then underwater, exploring the sonic potential below the surface of the Pacific Ocean with a four channel hydrophone array.
z'ev - untitled:
50 minutes and 3 seconds of binary-acoustics produced 12-14 February 2005, studio dop in Peckham, London
"Note: if you listen with headphones you will as close as possible hear what I heard composing it as I always and only work wearing headphones for just this reason
PS: contrary to some supposition I do not use audiophile headphones - just some old Sony mdr-cd580's"
Christian Fennesz & Max Nagl - Live at Amann Studios, Vienna: Recorded by Christoph Amann on 22nd December 2004 at 2200 hrs
Christian Fennesz and the renowned Viennese composer and saxophone player Max Nagl met at the studio during one of the studio's recent live recording sessions and spontaneously decided to do a show together. Originally intended as a secret gig, the details were leaked to a newspaper and a rammed studio witnessed a memorable live event...
With thanks to Christoph Amann for making this possible, and for mastering the recordin
Carl Michael von Hausswolff - AS QUIET AS A CAMPFIRE or ANALOGUE MOTORIC AND ELECTRO-MAGNETIC SILENCE DISTURBED BY INTUITIVE SLUMBER c/w MINGLING or DODEKAPHONIC DRONES INTERFERED BY KNOWN AND UNKNOWN DIGITAL PHENOMENA:
Track 1 - AS QUIET AS A CAMPFIRE or ANALOGUE MOTORIC AND ELECTRO-MAGNETIC SILENCE DISTURBED BY INTUITIVE SLUMBER: [Dedicated to John Cage] 20:42
Track 2 - MINGLING or DODEKAPHONIC DRONES INTERFERED BY KNOWN AND UNKNOWN DIGITAL PHENOMENA: [Dedicated to Arnold Schnberg] 20:06
Originally released on vinyl by Ash International [Ash # 3.7] in 1997
BJNilsen - Land of Lions: "I was invited by Phill Niblock to do a performance at his loft in Chinatown, New York. A suggestion was made that the night would be shared with my friend Lary 7 who also performed that evening. The playback system was configured as a quadraphonic speaker set-up. This is an A/B microphone recording.
With thanks to: Phill, Lary 7, Dion, Tonic and all the good spirits of NYC, and the recording engineer, Byron Westbrook"