Confabulations

Extract from Natasha Barrett: Urban Melt In Park Palais Meran, taken from Heterotopia, released March 4th, 2022.
https://natashabarrett.bandcamp.com/album/heterotopia

Heterotopia

Natasha Barrett: Urban Melt In Park Palais Meran - Extract, from album "Heterotopia"

Extract From Mark Vernon "A World Behind This World"

“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)

Acousmatic composition realised in 6th-order 3D ambisonics. This is an short extract from the middle of the composition, rendered to 'normal' stereo. The original composition is 17'00. More info here:
http://www.natashabarrett.org/Involuntary_Expression.html

Full length on: https://www.sargasso.com/product/natasha-barrett-leap-seconds/

Involuntary Expression Stereo Extract. Full length now released! See info

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

Persistence of Sound is a new independent record label celebrating musique concrète, field recordings and the interplay between these disciplines

Extract From Mark Vernon "A World Behind This World"

Persistence of Sound

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