Confabulations

“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

Sphaîra

Brutal Threshold

Water ripples all around, and echoing sounds stretch out into a shady sub aquatic habitat. Its dark corners slowly burst into view as cresting noises reveal fresh caverns teeming with liquid life. This is Sueños Acuáticos, the latest sonic exploration from Lamina, a musical project by French artist, Clarice Calvo-Pinsolle. Built from years of carefully gathered field recordings, the album constructs immersive, detailed soundscapes where watery environments, caves, and forests intertwine with digital manipulations.

Rooted in the myth of the ‘Lamina’, a creature from Basque folklore, the project blends this oral tradition with technology to build a geological myth. The Lamina’s world—a nocturnal ecosystem of water and stone—serves as the foundation for the album’s sound design. Lamina reshapes these natural recordings into something new: stretching, pitching, and layering them to build intricate sound environments that feel simultaneously organic and synthetic. “I transform these sounds much like I would sculpt in ceramics,” explains Calvo-Pinsolle, “by adding, removing material, and imagining landscapes.

Drawing from hydrofeminist and posthuman ideas, particularly those in Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water, the album treats sound like water—shifting, flowing, connecting, and buoying life. Tracks flow into one another without clear boundaries, much like the natural currents they represent. The result is a continuous listening experience, inviting deep focus on texture above melody.

Lamina is exploring the potential of the field recording as a compositional tool. Natural sounds, like trickling water or wind through trees, are processed out of recognition—or cliché. A sense of weightless immersion takes hold as Lamins’a music unfolds, and listeners float freely and choose their own adventure in the Lamina’s home. Less a set of songs than its own evolving environment, Sueños Acuáticos (‘Aquatic Dreams’ in English) is a meticulously constructed work in which we can freely float.

All tracks composed, recorded and mixed by Clarice Calvo-Pinsolle in Brussels in 2024
With the voice of Hochiwah on Aqualines

www.claricecalvopinsolle.com
lalamina.bandcamp.com
www.instagram.com/laminalalamina/

Mastered by Adam Badí Donoval
abdonoval.com

Artwork and design by Fen ToucheMoulin
www.instagram.com/touche_moulin/

Words by Tristan Bath
Photography by Michaela Cagáňová

Released by mappa as MAP054 in 2024
licence
mappa.bandcamp.com  
credits
released November 4, 2024

Lamina - Dissolution

YancityGurl - Shynet Ghost Macrotouch
Digital / Charity Release
28.03.25

"This release narrates fluently, but quite broadly. Its ellipsis symbolizes the permanent and arrhythmic pulse of time, in which anxiety and uncertainty have become the main criteria dividing any agency.

"A" is the initiating moment, immersion. Here, poetic postcards of the environment sparkle, inside which a ball of noise confidently swells, gradually pursuing and displacing a concise model of behavior, eventually turning everything into chaos.

"Topology" is a bundle of sounds and memories, where each slot becomes a marker of change, whether it's stumbling modular samples, a piano recorded in browser tabs, or a full—fledged story with a holistic structure that fades before it even begins.

"Walls", a final title composed of R&B diva vocals, a doomed reese bass part and infernal pads, sums up the mood, defining itself as a kind of symbol of the illusion of stability in this ragged chain."

All funds from this release are donated to https://livyj-bereh.org/

Livyj Bereh restores roofs for families and individuals who have had their homes decimated in the brutal war in Ukraine. 

“Their use of modest black corrugated metal roofs produces an architectural act of collective care and resistance across the country, as powerful as any civic monument and documented with the unflinching eye of the greatest war art.”

– Jury chair Tom Emerson RA and Stephanie Macdonald RA, 6a architects

Since May 2022, they have restored over 380 roofs across the Charkiv, Černihiv, and Kyiv regions at a cost of around €2000 per roof.

Alongside this hands-on restoration work, Livyj Bereh raises awareness globally through exhibitions, documenting the cultural and architectural heritage threatened by the conflict.

YancityGurl - A

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)

øjeRum - Tactic

Ronce - Əverything(?) Not Yet (Mai 2025)

 Live recorded at ГОСТ ЗВУК x ГЭС-2 event in ГЭС-2 on 03.05.2025

Sanctum Error: Angel.exe

This track is for relaxed listening, headphones on eyes closed. I have used samplers, synths and field recordings in its production.

soundscape IV (arrival)

C Razey - Chamber I (Intro)

ALBUM COVER BY WYATT DAWSON @sunsh1nearts
bonus track

Walk Home

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

From the forthcoming release 'Volume 3: Dance Of The Weeping Babe'

Subscribe to the Wolf Eyes mailing list at wolfeyes.net to find out more

Nate Young - Human Pond

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.

Nexotic Dislocation (with Ilaria Boffa)

Mark Vernon

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