There are 10,592 songs on my iPod. I often flick through the songs on random mode trying but failing to find something I want to listen to.

Barry  Burns - The iPod Shuffle

'Betamax and Dictaphones', is Chris Dooks' contribution tonight, from The Eskdalemuir Harmonium is a site-specific album orientated around a dying American harmonium - currently disintegrating in a farmhouse near Lockerbie. Much as one visits a sick relative in a care home, the record is a form of ‘sonic palliative care’ forming a third of Chris Dooks’ ongoing PhD. This is a spoken word track from lavish red vinyl album, a compressed radio documentary that closes side one. See http://kominorecords.com/site/news/portfolio/k0m1n0-004 to stream the album and to buy a copy. The project was launched at the CCA on the 11th of December 2012.

Chris Dooks - Betamax & Dictaphones

Synopsis: To celebrate International Women’s day this month Loop/
Garterstitch 100/ Garnethill Sisters took over The Old Hairdressers. Monica spent her day loitering in the Ladies toilets and asked women what they see when they look in the mirror. Caution: contains sounds of running water.
Biography: Monica works in community media.

Monica Brown - On reflections : what you see when you look in the mirror

Synopsis: The Hearth (2012) is a stereo composition which investigates one of the fundamentals of domestic rural architecture, the hearth, by means of location recordings carried out inside domestic spaces and enclosed cooking areas in rural Portugal. 
Biography: I work with instrumental, environmental and electronic sound. My work is currently directed towards a rigorous investigation of complexity and the materiality of sound.

James Wyness - The Hearth

Synopsis: Part of a listening trail in Blakelaw Park, Newcastle upon Tyne, based on two WWII military bunkers, the nerve centre for the air defence of the north of the UK. Participants collect a special receiver and headphones to listen to the stories at 8 listening posts. A collaboration with Collective Architecture and Mike Hyatt Landscape Architects, commissioned by Newcastle City Council
Biography: Lucie works with communities and organisations to produce public artworks based on connections with place. She works in sound, looking to share outcomes with the wider community often as part of collaborative celebratory events, serving as a platform for a diverse mix of voices of a much wider narrative.

Lucie Potter - Secret Bunker NORTH Location 4

Synopsis: The story of how I helped a neighbour move thousands of his tiny friends to a new home. For me the story speaks about community, society, and modern day isolation. This piece was entered into the 2012 Third Coast Audio Festival Shortdocs Challenge, and made a recomended listen.
Biography:Tom Allan is an independent radio maker and journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He works for BBC Radio Scotland as a freelance reporter, produces radio features for American radio shows like FSRN and Making Contact, and runs community media projects.

Tom Allan - Bee a Good Neighbour

Synopsis: Word of Mouth is fixed medium work that uses the human voice as the only sound source, with the guiding inspiration being gestural phonetic onsets and the emergence of non-linguistic vocal sounds on the breath.
Biography: Nichola Scrutton is a sound artist and composer, with a particular interest in using the voice as communicative and sonorous material in live performance and acousmatic compositions; interdisciplinary collaboration; and sound as a vehicle to explore creativity in the broadest sense.

Nichola Scrutton - Word Of Mouth

Synopsis: This is the soundtrack of a video of the same title (https://vimeo.com/36233229).  It seeks to evoke the mystical quality of water in nature through a combination of vocal sounds (breathing, whispering and humming) and field recording of waves.  The field recording is provided by mossan_hoshi on soundcloud.com.  The music is composed and vocalised by Lin Li. 
Biography: Lin lives in Glasgow.  She has been making videos and sound pieces since 2011 and likes the fact that they are more ethereal and do not take up too much physical space.  As a keen choral singer, she also enjoys experimenting with her voice.

Lin Li - So near, so far

Synopsis: 'Public Address: Hello Can You Hear Me Now?' was curated by Rob Kennedy on behalf of the Queens Park Railway Club. A storyteller, a performance artist/poet, a cellist, a comedian and a xylophonist were givien the opportunity to broadcast to the early morning commuters at Queens Park railway station in Glasgow. Due to what can only have been an administrative error, I was the story teller. This is a work in progress version of the 4 variations of the story performed and recorded on the day.

Barry Burns - Doing Quisby Episode 1

This sound piece was recorded at a seller’s bag stall at a bazaar in a village on the South coast of Turkey in August this year. The sound of the call to prayer can be heard in the distance and is repeated four times daily.

Tian Miller is an artist living and working in Norway. She mainly works with mediums such as textiles and drawing but has more recently gained an interest in making use of sound in her practice.

Tian Miller - Mahmutlar Bazaar

Synopsis: This piece was recorded on the  Isle of Eigg using an adapted tenor horn, partly submerged in the tank of a hydram pump. On Eigg the main spring st Columbas well is lower than many of the crofts and they use hydram pumps to get the water up the hill. These are amazing mechanical devices that are powered by the gravity of falling water. The water falls through valves that intermittently open and close with an audible pulse. The principle that governs this behaviour is very similar to the conditions that create sound. It is a to and fro of equally opposing forces a steady but not stagnant state. The water pushes a valve open then the valve pushes back over and over. It is the same thing you can see happening when you play a horn with a balloon membrane the air pushes past the balloon then the balloon snaps shut, the resulting vibration is what you hear as sound. 
Biography: Sarah Kenchington lives on a farm in the Campsies, she studied sculpture and has been building and adapting musical instruments for the past 10 years. All of her instruments are human powered, mechanically assisted, acoustic devises. Some are designed to be played in a conventional sense, like her pedal powered double ended hurdy gurdy/banjo. Others are designed to compose the music, like the Bell Tower a pyramid structure that distributes balls in a mathematical pattern. Her Flutterbox, a mechanical sequencer, generates rhythmic loops, or colour coded musical notation. In her performances Kenchington plays a semi-mechanical, pedal and pump powered orchestra, involving many of her instruments at the same time. She has performed internationally at experimental music festivals including, Suoni Per Il Popolo, Montreal 2012, and Tectonics Glasgow 2014 and also as part of theatre, radio and film projects. 


Sarah Kenchington - Pump and Parp

Synopsis: The Mineral Mind is an absurd survival narrative which is told simultaneously in both future and past tenses. The mental wanderings of the protagonist drift from the chemical composition of the body to suggestions of erotic fantasy.
Biography: Catherine Street is a visual artist whose work tends to consist of layers of experience: her own body is often incorporated within an installation setting that has video, audio, drawn, sculptural, and written elements. The atmosphere is usually unnerving, tense, sensual, comical.


Catherine Street - The Mineral Mind

Synopsis: This is an edit  from a 30 minute piece broadcast live from Octopus hq in Barrow In Furness as part of the Hannah Radio day in July 2014, performed using 2 domestic record players, five walkman-type cassette machines and a bit of guitar. It's part of a wider project 
loosely inspired by the allure of tape and  vinyl, and a great 
admiration for some key figures in  independant record production in the UK in the early 60's.

Biog: John Hall is an artist working with sound, text and visuals, He is based in South Cumbria and  is a co-director of The Octopus Collective Sound Arts and Music Organisation, which produces the biannual FON Festival. 

Web: http://octopuscollective.com/


John Hall - The State Funeral Of Joe Meek

Lights Out Listening Group is a unique listening event that takes place in almost complete darkness. We have been running regular events in Glasgow since 2011. 

Through this bi-monthly event we hope to form a community of sound makers – putting people in touch so that they can get advice, support and feedback on their work and possibly find new audiences and new people to work with. It is an opportunity for contributors to test their audio creations out on a small audience of like-minded individuals who share a love of radio and the sonic arts. As well as recorded media we also wish to give a platform to live spoken word performances. This group is open to anybody working with sound at all stages of their career including students, professionals and amateurs.

Each listening event is made up of a programme of sound and radio works submitted to us in advance. A short printed programme including a brief synopsis of each work and a short biog of the producer is handed out on the night. Examples of the type of work included in previous editions can be heard on this Soundcloud page.

For more details please visit our blog: http://lightsoutlisteninggroup.wordpress.com/about/


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