Skipton Brass band performing Christmas carols, as heard from the limestone pavement.

Christmas carols from Malham Cove

‘Don’t You Think It’s a Bit’ is an electroacoustic composition with voices that takes the logic of Tiepido Cool, and the project’s notion of a human algorithm, and explores them sonically. The piece has two layers. There is a fourteen-minute evolving soundscape produced by sound artist Jan Mertens, in conversation with me. This part draws on electronic sounds, orchestral sample libraries and a range of percussive noises. The sounds are arranged on a spectrum from warm to cool, using some common visual metaphors as organising principles (the idea that lower frequencies are ‘warmer’, for example, and that electronic sounds are ‘cooler’). We have not, however, used external measuring devices to determine the sequence. Rather, it is the result of our own listening, feeling and talking, and it reflects our associations, conditions and biases.
 
The second layer of ‘Don’t You Think It’s a Bit’ emerges at the mid-point of the piece. Twenty different voices speak forty-five different words. These words are the product of the workshop held at the University of St Andrews in February 2023. As the participants entered the workshop, Jan and Johanna recorded each of their voices and used the recordings to place them on a warm-cool spectrum, again, using our own subjective judgment. At the end of the workshop, Johanna organised the participants into a warm-cool chorus and orchestrated a complex, live vocal gradient. These voices punctuate the soundscape in the finished piece in a kind of mesmerising chant.
  
‘Don’t You Think It’s a Bit’ emerged out of conversation with Elodie Laügt and Derek Duncan, conversation with Davide D’Elia, conversation between Jan and I, conversation with people we met at the workshop, conversation punctuated by a proposal, permission slips and conducting a logistically complicated unrehearsed chorus (me), recording and improvisation with synthesised and acoustic sounds (Jan), lots of editing and refining (Jan again), lots more talk (Jan and me both).   
There is a common cliché that the visual is concerned with surfaces while the sonic is suited to the interior. Visual images appear, sounds emerge. In his book Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, Veit Erlmann argues that instead of seeking to document an acoustic interior, it is more interesting to ask ‘what it is about the ear… that allows a person to speak of this experience as pertaining to his or her inner self in the first place’.[1] In making ‘Don’t You Think It’s a Bit’, we discovered a kind of productive incoherence produced by collapsing the distinction between visual metaphor, sonic vibration, subjective judgment and terms of engagement. Without answering Erlmann's question, we explore some of the pleasures and uneasiness of asking it.
 
The title of our piece gestures to return, iteration, return, different iteration. Don't you think it's a little bit warm? Don't you think it's a little bit cool? Don't you think it's a bit dry? Don't you think it's a bit heavy? Don't you think it's a bit pink? Don't you think it's a bit blue? Modulating across the senses, a method for synaesthetic chit-chat that might also augur the end of the world. The macro and the micro. The three categories in operation at the workshop – aesthetics, multi-lingualism and climate change – informed our conversations and process, even if they are not necessarily detectable within the final piece.
Jan says, a shift in temperature can be uncomfortable, a simply true statement and a profound, even existential, understatement.

Don't You Think It's A Bit...

Wet Tech live session from Dundee for International Drone Day 2025 by Martin Zeilinger & Jan Mertens. Broadcasted live on Instagram

International Drone Day 2025

Ghoststories

This piece, which is inspired on the secret number stations, was created as a collaboration with Johanna Linsley and is part of a larger project she's developing as an associate of the Pacitti Company Think Tank. 
"This project is based on a simple premise, which is nevertheless hardly known outside of a small but growing group. 
The future is a place, it turns out. Its relationship to the present is not, in fact, temporal, but geographical. The future has borders and characteristics and what might sloppily be termed a 'nature'. But it has no structure of its own. So it extracts human potential from the present. A complicated algorithm – or not quite an algorithm – that’s another sloppy but useful analogy. Anyway, this not-quite-algorithm translates present potential into substance and, eventually, consciousness. Thanks to this, the future has features, and a population.
Traces of the future can be found in the following:
Arguments that spiral, pointlessly.
Phrases that are repeated, as if to re-capture their meaning.
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
Political energy that dissipates. Collective will that collapses. The future is greedy for what happens right after people feel right on the brink of something.

Present potential is identified and extracted by Future Professionals. The skills and techniques employed by these Professionals are no doubt fascinating and complex in their own right, but unfortunately we know next to nothing about them. We have intercepted communications between Future Professionals but have found them so incomprehensible, even in the hands of our most talented code breakers, that we must assume they are using a form of jargon so esoteric that it is beyond the grasp of the uninitiated."

janmertens

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