Confabulations

Recorded with a stereo microphone inserted into the mouth of a metal drainpipe following a downpour of rain. Rhythmic staccato drips with tight echo. At some points the percussive hits are reminiscent of a typewriter. Passing traffic audible in background.

From the new LP - 'Sonograph Sound Effects Series Volume 2: Public and Domestic Plumbing and Sanitation' (CCP007)

BUY NOW: callingcardspublishing.bandcamp.com/album/s…itation

Mark Vernon presents the second volume of his Sonograph Sound Effects Series – the follow up to the unexpectedly popular ‘Sounds of the Modern Hospital’ LP. This time the focus is on sounds of plumbing and sanitation: drainpipes, plugholes, leaks, squeaky taps and cisterns.

Vernon has recorded many of the sounds from unusual perspectives, in extreme close-up scenarios, using contact mics or small binaural microphones to get into tiny inaccessible spaces. There is also a particular focus on plumbing on-board vehicles and vessels in motion. The intention here is to reveal the marvellous within the most mundane and every day of sounds.

The record masquerades as a collection of generic archetypal sounds whilst in actuality it revels in the specific and unique – some of the most idiosyncratic and characterful instances of such sounds. No two gurgles are alike.

As an avid collector of sound effects records these obsolete discs have gradually taken on new meaning for Vernon as unintended audio time capsules. As their use value has decreased their value as historical audio documents has grown. To produce a sound effects LP in the age of digital audio libraries is an anachronistic gesture intended to elevate what purports to be a generic collection of recordings intended for functional use to the level of an artwork.

The album is in part a homage to classic ranges of sound effects albums such as the BBC Sound Effects Library - even down to the utilitarian design and functional descriptions of the sounds (a key aspect of this release). Such generic collections of sounds were intended to fulfil the needs of professional and amateur broadcasters, filmmakers and theatre producers. However, through careful selection and sequencing it is also intended that this record works as a linear sound composition.

>>> Utilitarian unsounds for undisclosed purposes <<<

All Recordings made by Mark Vernon
Sleeve Design and Artwork by Marc Baines

Drainpipe Drips - Following a sudden downpour

Tape Letters from the Waiting Room

Mark Vernon - Ill Fitting Rooms

From the LP 'Tape Letters from the Waiting Room' by Mark Vernon.
Released by: Psyché Tropes

Beforetime Guests

Out now on Gagarin Records. Available to buy here:
markvernon.bandcamp.com/album/time-deferred

Followers of the artist Mark Vernon will note a subdued and pensive mood on this new record. Monochrome and sepulchral, these tracks are in a minor key, a key which opens the door to a damp cellar of the imagination. Too-many legged spiders crawl over dusty violins. Time lurches, loops and echoes like excursions on slow motion railways in reverse. Concrète noir sombre séances for non-believers. Tauntological voices from the past provoke us. Half guessed ghosts, magnetic phantoms from funereal-to-reel tape recordings. The sibilant persistence of the deceased evokes the exhausted dread of waiting for a medical test result. Enigmatic messages thrown to the werewolves with nothing but cheap medication and some breathing exercises for support.

Caution: this record can cause dreamless nights.

“Psychedelic visions, blackouts and blinding lights reveal an unusual, sick, and feverish musicality... here the gods come back from the dead only to ensure us an existence nurtured by the freezing rays of a black sun.”

Massimiliano Busti, Blow Up (Feb 2022)

A Coincidence Of Deceleration And Acceleration

Marky B - In the House W/ Sluggy Beats

Extract From Mark Vernon "A World Behind This World"

“This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.” 
 (Don Draper, Mad Men)

Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind’s eye - projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listeners’ mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism.

Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the 60s and 70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from my own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that I have collected over the past twenty years.

Scotland, 1971

CC02

@nowherearu @markvernon

From Mal de Débarquement by Elen Huynh & Mark Vernon
https://chosescontraires.bandcamp.com/album/mal-de-d-barquement

Elen Huynh & Mark Vernon - The Martyrdom of K

Elen Huynh & Mark Vernon - To Roar or to Whisper

Audio Archaeology Series Volume 3: Brest

Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France.

The piece is comprised of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document the recordist, Michel’s tastes in music and radio programmes of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations.

In the composition family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.

Sound Art, Radio Art, Field Recording, Found Sound, Musique Concrete, Electroacoustic, Experimental, Soundscape, Radiophonic

The Past Imperfect

'Seas Unite Us / Vitrified Exhalations' 

Two tracks produced for the Sub Rosa LP/CD ‘Conversations with the Anthony Burgess cassette archives (1964-1993)’ in 2019.

Anthony Burgess’s second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it and curate sonic conversations from others.

Disc 1 contains the very first and last known recordings of Burgess’s voice alongside domestic incidents, rehearsals and answering machine messages, while Disc 2 invites 23 artists and musicians to remix the rare material into a unique Burgess portrait far beyond ‘A Clockwork Orange’ including reinterpretations by Chris Watson, Dinah Bird, Scanner, Mark Vernon and many others.

The project was curated by Alan Dunn in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Sub Rosa.

'Vitrified Exhalations' from ‘Conversations with the Anthony Burgess cassette archives (1964-1993)’

From the Futura Resistenza LP 'The Dramaturgy of Decay' by Mark Vernon.

https://markvernon.bandcamp.com/album/the-dramaturgy-of-decay

The Years Simply Dissolved

"Cruel folk you are, unmatched for jealousy, you gods who cannot bear to let a goddess sleep with a man." (Calypso to Hermes, who has just ordered her to release Odysseus. Homer, Odyssey 5.120)


Calypso’s Dream is a soundscape collection sculpted from the subtle sonic morphologies of the micro-environments on the island of Mljet in the South Adriatic. The collection serves as a conceptual counterpoint to Homer’s Odyssey and a critical reflection on commercial island attractions such as Odysseus’s Cave, where he was supposedly held captive for seven long years by the nymph Calypso.

In search of a different gender approach to the ancient Greek myth and its contemporary commercial appropriation, we created a simple narrative from Calypso’s perspective, inspired by the work of the renowned writer Margaret Atwood, who wrote The Penelopiad, and tried to unravel the archetypal mystery by narrating the Odyssey from the perspective of his wife Penelope, who was left for 20 years to defend the kingdom and raise their children.

Calypso’s Dream is an attempt to create a symbolic micro-episode of The Penelopiad within the medium of sound art, woven from the dense spectrum of the island’s biophony, instrumental and improvised narratives, critically reflecting on the commercial appropriation of culture, advocating for the importance of a listening culture, and emphasizing the urgency of raising ecological awareness.

The island of Mljet is one of the oldest European protected natural zones, still, there is so much more that can be done to keep this Adriatic marvel away from harsh trends of mass tourism.

--

The release includes a PDF booklet containing curatorial text and images of Mljet's many aquatic micro-environments, flora, and fauna.

The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, and the Dubrovnik-Neretva County Department for Education and Culture. 

All sounds recorded and edited by Manja Ristić & Mark Vernon
Hydrophones used for underwater recording — JrF & Aquarian
Mastering by Goran Simonoski / La Plant Studio
Cover art, images, text by Manja Ristić

Miserable Man Ulysses

Sélection Prix Art sonore

Mark Vernon
A Loop Within A Loop
33’32, autoproduction (Grande Bretagne)

Le métro de Glasgow forme un réseau à double sens circulaire et con-centrique. La pièce reconstitue l’atmosphère de ce réseau  par une ex-ploration des circularités, répétitions et mouvements qui l’animent. L’accumulation d’enregistrements, d’interviews d’anciens conducteurs de train, de voix et de sons qui bougent et rebondissent, vont et vien-nent, s’amplifient et disparaissent  dessine une carte sensible des lieux  – traduisant leur obscurité insondable et la lumière au bout du tunnel.

Mark Vernon vit à Glasgow. A travers ses œuvres sonores et radiophoniques, il explore les notions d’archéologie audio, de mémoire magnétique et de nostalgie Au cœur de sa pratique se trouve une fascination pour l’intimité de la voix radio, le son ambiant et la réappropriation des enregistrements trouvés.
http://meagreresource.com

Script : http://phonurgia.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/23_Mark-Vernon_A-Loop-Within-A-Loop_2_Mark_Vernon_-_A_Loop_Within_A_Loop_-_Transcript-1722077847-1.pdf

Mark Vernon _ A Loop Within A Loop

Scissors

From the album 'Unforced Errors' on Vice de Forme.

Music & mixing by Mark Vernon
Sonopetry& mixing by @ilaria_boffa

Sonopoem - 'Ode for Complexity' by Ilaria Boffa

'Ode for Complexity

And what’s next? Next roots to eradicate, cultures to dominate, archetypes to steal. Cyborg and Pseudo.
Assume mediocrity. No phenomenon is special, privileged, exceptional or superior.
Assume the principle, ‘if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's likelier to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories’.
And yet, the probability of being mediocre is increasing. The service of thinking is at risk.
Too-much-ness of counter-intuition. It’s hard to do difficult things.

*‘E’ difficile fare le cose difficili:
parlare al sordo,
mostrare la rosa al cieco.
Bambini, imparate a fare le cose difficili:
dare la mano al cieco,
cantare per il sordo,
liberare gli schiavi che si credono liberi’.

Clouds are moving fast. They’re shifting perspective. Carry me with you.'

* Nursery rhyme by Gianni Rodari, late Italian writer, especially children’s literature, pedagogist, journalist and poet.

It’s difficult to do difficult things: 
To talk to a deaf,
to show a rose to a blind. 
Children! Learn to do difficult things:
take the blind by hand, 
sing for the deaf, 
set free slaves who believe themselves free.

Nexotic Dislocation (with Ilaria Boffa)

A signal from the void. Echoes of distant worlds and rhythms lost in time weave through this transmission. No coordinates. No destination. Just the slow pull of gravity and the flicker of forgotten stars. Drift deeper… the unknown is calling

Come hang out at the TFBS Space Command Discord

discord.gg/uBwWDEn

Watch live TFBS at Twitch.tv/TheFutureBeatsShow

➤ Twitch.tv/TheFutureBeatsShow | bsky.app/profile/complexion.bsky.social | instagram.com/Complexion | contact@djcomplexion.com

Grade – Ocean View
grimelabinc – ponder2025
Bastian Bell – TELL ME DO U WANNA
cupidsoppression! – BASED WORLD
rinzler. – PIMMIES DILEMMA [RINZ EDIT]
Thoriq – Honey Mustard
AstroCantMiss – Chero
sleepdealer – Dreamland
Elijah Fox – Never Let Me Go
grimelabinc – LawnGreen-110
Kinda Rad – Aeons
Baredex – candid
Sweeps – wave radio
Kinda Rad – Online Lobby
hxly xo – Catara
ErrX – breaking down
Uncle Kizzy – dowhatneonsay
VNSN (*B-Sides) – dontwastemytime.
NxxxxxS – There Is A Place
KVSIDI – Shopping Spree (Instrumental)
Parkland – factory settings
erickD – Run It Back (UNDERGROUND SOUNDLAB)
Angry Apple – Caldera
erickD – Mood Swings w/ DSCOFF
Blacksheep! – Acquisition
lftd – dissolve w/ noyse
j dub beats – just a thought
Reon Vangèr – HIGH
BOYDEGA – sin on purpose
Amon – Closure (Slowed)
LOS.WAV – Men I Trust – Show Me How (Los.Wav Remix)
L.Dre – after all
Ashton McCreight – break yo back
Ziahfyah – YU YU HASKUSHO #zessbounce
erickD – Closer & Closer
tenseoh – Say
Miri Dawn – Lumina (Slowed & Revised)
Guhbs – 4theDawgs
Inteus – Enraptured
Elijah Fox – Desert Mirage




The Future Beats Show Episode 342 - Downtempo Beats, Phonk and House Grooves

A selection of eclectic short works that were previously unpublished.

08 Tozmevoco was created using processed voice samples from Tom Ze's "Jogos De Armar (Faça Você Mesmo) [Bonus Disc]". Thank you, Tom Ze!

14 Nutsirl Fichusytus

The term ‘tape-sponding’ means, quite literally, correspondence by tape. As tape recorders became more widely available there developed a trend for communication by tape. Special 3″ reels were produced with designs that featured slogans like ‘Links Absent Friends’ or ‘Voice Letter’. They included space for an address and a stamp on the box like a postcard. It was an excellent way for families and friends separated by great distances to keep in touch. These ‘letters on tape’ were sent all over the world. There is something far more personal about hearing the actual voices of loved ones, the subtle nuances, inflections and idiosyncrasies of the voice that a pen and paper couldn’t begin to emulate. For a time there were also ‘tape-sponding’ clubs – people who had never met would record messages to each other sending them around the country like pen-pals. Sometimes round-robin tapes would be sent around a circle, each person adding their message as the tape was passed along.

Tapesponding excerpts

ACT02 Mark Vernon: The World Backwards

@markvernon kicking off our 2nd ACT on our mix series. 

He is a Glasgow based sound artist with a particular and unsettling flair for re-appropriating environmental sound and obsolete media. A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, home sing-alongs, answer-phone messages and other lost voices all find their way into his bewitching soundworlds. His solo music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Flaming Pines, Misanthropic Agenda, Entr’acte and 3Leaves. A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he co-runs Glasgow art radio station, Radiophrenia and has produced programmes internationally for stations including Resonance FM, VPRO, CKUT, Sound Art Radio, Kunstradio, Wavefarm, RADIA and the BBC.

Confabulations

acrstudio