Westerlies 11:53 (2000)
A reverie; unashamedly pastoral and idyllic. The sound sources for Westerlies were nearly all collected in the west of England between 1997 and 2000. They amount to a series of countryside clichés: a watermill, bees and skylarks. There are discreet signs human activity: the sound of digging; a plane drones overhead, not so much an intrusion, as much as a reminder of another place. This ‘presence’ does, however, come to the fore (literally and metaphorically) in the middle of the piece with a sonic account of a balloon flight over the same part of the country. And yet, the actual flight - so sensuous in many other ways - was surprisingly uneventful as an adventure in sound. Thus, this sonic anecdote is not to be entirely trusted.

Westerlies

Dry Some Rain (Two Short Pieces)

Alistair MacDonald's and my first collaboration since 1997, started with field recordings of birds made across the UK: corvids in Dorset, starlings on the Isle of Lewis, buzzards and finches in Aberdeenshire, gulls and kittiwakes on the easternmost tip of Scotland and curlews in the North Pennines. Their songs manifest themselves in dense choruses and individual calls across riverbanks, precipitous cliffs, plains and valleys. The piece is a playful kaleidoscopic counterpoint of these original recordings and their transformations.

A Confluence of Birds - Nicholas Virgo & Alistair MacDonald

Red Lorry 21:43 (2001)
The title, Red Lorry, is derived from the piece's primary sound material of traffic. These recordings were captured during one of the European-wide demonstrations by road hauliers against petrol prices during the Summer of 2000. It is also a reference to the tongue-twister, "red lorry, yellow lorry" which brought to mind, if not literal binary opposites, then at least 'oppositional' situations. Red Lorry is a soundtrack to an internalised road movie; faux-symphonic and tiro-disco; the clichéd, kitsch and romanticised vying against the ostensible sonic verisimilitude of street and motorway recordings.

Red Lorry

Pipers practising in a field at the MacPherson Gathering and Newtonmore, Highland Show (2008)

MacPhersons

Bugged is a curious soundtrack made for an installation by textile-artist, Deirdre Nelson (https://deirdre-nelson.co.uk/Bugged.)  
Brodsworth Hall is a Victorian pile near Doncaster, Yorkshire. In 1952, the house was largely abandoned by its owners. As they moved out, new 'tenants' moved in and when the building reopened forty or so years later, its carpets were infested by insects (rare and common).
I was lucky to have access to source recordings of the house's inhabitants from below and above stairs. My soundtrack evokes the skittering of the insects. Occasionally, they reminisce about the old days. The chatter is good-natured, but not always in agreement. Bugged unfolds gently, and is cyclical with no real start or end. Once in a while there is more activity and then everything subsides back into the ground.

Bugged

I enjoy sound for sound's sake. Nevertheless titles are required, hence Catgrease: the music of trying to catch a greased cat in an expanding and contracting space.

Catgrease

“Fall•Drop•Sink” is the blunt-edged description of the piece’s point of departure: quite simply, drops of water cascading into a resonant metal sink. The sink inflects the sound of droplets, splashes and bubbles and these, in turn, are accentuated by the treatment of sound within the computer.

The music yields to a contemplative section where the density of activity is suspended. This is the transition from a ‘formal’ world of sound for sound’s sake, to one which hints at another narrative: we emerge onto the flat horizon and brooding North Sea of the Norfolk coast on a grey day in October. The ‘drips’ remain as hints of rain, rock pools and ethereal electronica suspended above the opening seascape. Eau naturel?

FallDropSink

Hickory Dockery (2010)
My mother had three wind-up clocks. The said clocks, collectively and individually,  were more or less reliable. Between five to and five past and twenty-five to and twenty-five past they would fizzle, whirr and karrrunk into action either together or as part of a discrete, tuneless litany.  
This is my homage to those clocks: not a piece about time, but about timepieces. A piece in which the proverbial mouse scampers up and down, setting in motion arcane horological activities.

Nicholas Virgo

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