'Time Deferred' LP - selected tracks (Gagarin Records, 2022)

experimental music playlist

Confabulations

Noveller's "No Dreams" remixed by Polinski.

No Dreams (Polinski remix)

Awake (Mixthoven Demo)

By David Fulford and Mark Vernon.

Out now on Gagarin Records. Available to buy here:
https://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)

Time Deferred

Athanasia

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

From the LP record 'Time Deferred'. 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)

The New Game Of Emulation

“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

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

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

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)

From the album "_code"
Native State Records
Aerostatic 2006

Drone

Jasper Walden & Petrichor - Orka

Simon Whetham is an acute listener, a field recorder, a thinker, a globetrotter, and a mobilizer. However, he is also a sonic cook. Wherever he goes, he picks up sounds and atmospheres as if they were exotic ingredients. And for "What Matters Is That It Matters", he made us a stew, slowly simmered until all the flavours come through.

"What Matters Is That It Matters", Whetham's first album for Baskaru, is slow music. And slow music deserves to be taken in slowly – you don't wolf comfort food down, you savour it, relishing its complexity, absorbing its warmth. Unlike most of Whetham's previous works, this album is not focused on a specific geographical location. As if the artist had given himself free reign. The resulting music has a career-encompassing feel, as Whetham touches base with pure field recordings, elongated instrumental textures, and treated snippets of melodies (piano, banjo). "What Matters Is That It Matters" provides an incredibly rich listening experience, pairing relevant esthetical concerns and listening enjoyment.

Englishman Simon Whetham has been exploring the art of composing with field recordings and found sounds for a decade, a period during which he released music on labels such as Crónica, Entr'acte, Helen Scarsdale Agency, and Line. He is perhaps best known for "Active Crossover," a workshop/collaboration/installation project with which he is travelling the world.

Simon Whetham - You Can't Escape The Past

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

For bookings: meagreresource@hotmail.com

Mark Vernon is a Glasgow based sound artist who works with found tapes and acousmatic presence. His work explores themes of magnetic memory, audio archaeology, voyeurism and nostalgia. His solo music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Glistening Examples, Flaming Pines, Misanthropic Agenda, Entr’acte and Canti Magnetici. He co-runs and curates Glasgow art radio station, Radiophrenia and has produced programmes for stations internationally.