experimental / noise / field recording / onkyo / musique concréte / contemporary

A track I produced for a workshop by Angelina Deck for high school kids at TENT Rotterdam.

Room for Imagination

Plexure

Worse

Giancarlo Toniutti & Tiziano Dominighini - Counterchronology (Excerpt)

from the album "Stereo Bugscope 00" (CD 2004)
by  Haco
「ステレオ・バグスコープ 00」
HACO

The name "Stereo Bugscope" refers to a performance system that detects oscillating sounds emitted by the circuitry of electronic devices. It also signifies the act of listening to the electromagnetic world that emerges from the inside of devices such as computers, cell phones, MD players, and wireless routers through the use of two inductive microphones (pickups). The oscillating-circuit sounds come from the IC board and clock, and the electromagnetic noise comes from the electrical current that turns the fan and drives the motor. Waveforms similar to the audio frequencies of electromagnetic leakage, which is faintly emitted from machines, are also released by the inductive coil in a pickup. The sound is then electronically amplified to magnify these signals which are ordinarily so faint as to be inaudible. According to one's position in relation to and distance from the source, changes in the sound can be observed. 

ステレオ・バグスコープ｣は、電子機器内部における回路上の動作発振音を検出するシステム。二つの誘導性マイクロフォン（ピックアップ）を用いて機器回路から発生した電磁界を覗く。 コンピュータ、携帯電話、デジタル・プレーヤー、無線ルータなどの基盤上のIC、クロック、ファン、モーター駆動などによる電磁ノイズを拾う。 機器からかすかに磁気漏れした音声周波数の信号と同様の波形が、ピックアップの誘導コイル内にも発生し、それを電気的に増幅している。これらは通常、不可聴な微弱信号である。発生源との位置、距離の関係により音の変化が観察できる。

Awarded Honorary Mention in digital music category at Prix Ars Electronica 2005 (AU)
2005年アルスエレクトロニカ (オーストリア) 受賞作品

■ Label / レーベル ■ Improvised Music from Japan (IMJ-523) (JP) 

☁ Details / 詳細
http://www.japanimprov.com/indies/imj/stereobugscope/index.html

Stereo Bugscope 00

Haco - Bugfield 1 (excerpt)

Vacant Possession (2019) 14' 10”

This piece has been woven from field recordings, radio recordings, answering machine messages and concert recordings made in the 1990s, and also includes some TV and music from the time. The field recordings were originally made for my CD album for Project Arts Centre, Invisible City (1999), as part of their 'Off Site' series of exhibitions during building renovations.

Going back to these recordings twenty years later is a curious experience, a time machine to different times, where, in a digital surgery of grafting and transfusion, presences are reanimated, spirits invoked, vacated spaces haunted. It's a sonic seance, a poltergeist's pantomime, an entropy tango. I'm reminded of how Iain Sinclair pithily described the editing process for London Orbital (2002), his film with Chris Petit: “The choice was stark: become a digital mudlark, rummaging through exhausted footage for retrievable images. Fool's gold, dropped down the toilet bowl of the culture.”

This piece functions like a radio play or cinema for the ears, where hybrid scenes are stitched from various parts of my record of the decade, and different characters appear and disappear. Though the recordings were not part of any attempt to exhaustively document the decade, merely part of an ongoing continuum of recordings of things that interested me. Edits from solo and collaborative performances of mine colour the second half of the piece. Wading through the tapes, there were some things I'd completely forgotten (and glad) I'd recorded. 

Certain signature sounds are salient parts of the landscape for me, and work like 'soundmarks' or sonic landmarks. The particular texture of Dublin bus engines, and the call of the Moore Street traders that is pure music to me, no need to loop it or add to it, it's music 'in the field' in the best sense, part of a continuum of village vendors calling out across time the world over. Their calls are almost gone now, sadly, in a changed landscape and regulatory framework where traders, since the beginning of this year are not allowed to pass licenses down through families, as they had done for decades. I fear it's the beginning of a process that will see them eventually leached out in favour of larger developments. 

Radio was more a part of my media landscape then, and hearing certain sig tunes really takes me back – Morning Ireland, Gay Byrne (the point where I switched off), Myles Dungan on Today at Five, Scrap Saturday (satire the likes of which we have not heard since). Callan's Kicks, try though it might, just doesn't cut it like Dermot Morgan et al used to so hilariously. 

The 90s was a time of enormous flux and upheaval in the built environment, and thankfully I had the presence of mind to photograph various sites around the city as they underwent significant changes. Looking back over these, I'm reminded how much dereliction, open space and abandoned property there was (going back 20 years or more). It was a gap-toothed city, with areas steadily accumulating value till the developers swept in for the kill. Signage on some empty properties would flag it as 'vacant possession', meaning there were no sitting tennants, the building was well and truly empty, and free of any potential impediments to development.

Photos can be viewed here: 

https://flic.kr/s/aHsksFuf6s


Fergus Kelly 
January 2019

Vacant Possession

This is an extract from a much longer (42 min, in two parts) piece  of electroacoustic music that I made using sounds from Jean Tinguely's mechanised sculptures. I recorded these at The Tinguely Museum in Basel.  Many of Tinguely's mechanised sculptures self-destructed, or were not maintained, and The Tinguely Museum is the only place where you can still see a ggod selection of his sculptures still in working order.  The sounds are sometimes manipulated drastically, sometimes minimally.  I also used some shortwave radio sounds as material.  Some of Tinguely's later works struck me as meditations on death and the afterlife, and I hope this comes across in the piece.  The image is a painting by Emma P. O'Bong, titled Fernschreiber III.

Ritual For Jean Tinguely

Ritual For Jean Tinguely PT 1 Extract

Full album here: 
https://zeenaparkins.bandcamp.com/album/three-harps-tuning-forks-electronics-2

Three Harps, Tuning Forks & Electronics

Three Harps: Tuning Forks

Music lover & collector. Art, technology, design and fashion fan, futurist.

A founder member of the electroacoustic improvisation group Morphogenesis (formed 1985), Prime has also recorded and performed with artists such as Organum, Jim O’Rourke, Eddie Prevost, Max Eastley, David Toop and Geert Feytons.  Since 1987, the use of bioactivity translators to amplify the electrical activity of plants and fungi has been central to much of Prime’s work.  Michael has presented his plant sound installations at venues such as the Mendel Museum (Brno), the NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo), the Halles de Schaarbeek (Brussels), the Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol), the Peblink Gallery (Copenhagen), the Centre for Experimental and Improvised Music (Madrid), and the old Beamish Brewery in Cork (Ireland). His sound work has been the subject of programmes on radio stations in Denmark (Radio P2), Germany (WDR3 and HR2), Mexico (R. Mexico), the USA (WBZ and WDCD), Japan (Airplane Radio) and the UK (Resonance FM and BBC Radio 3).

An excerpt from Michael's "L-Fields" cd can be heard on the soundtrack to Gaspar Noe's film, "Enter The Void". His recordings of Silkworm Moths feature on the soundtrack to the forthcoming film by Peter Strickland, 'The Duke of Burgundy'.

Ritual For Jean Tinguely PT 1 Extract

Michael Prime

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