Light streams down, clear and warm, through a glass grid in the ceiling, and as the day expands, shadow bands slowly find their way across the long wooden tables far below. The reading room is speckled with researchers of diverse ages, most of whom are tracing relatives long since returned to dust, and conversations rise and fall, ping-ponging back and forth, soft and reverbed and sounding like the origins of polyphony. Somehow, everyone in this book-lined corral seems further away than they actually are, until they're right beside you.

Sitting here listening, the past is somehow more distant than ever and, at the same time, closer to the skin. Camped beside a microphone, I zoom through the structure in my mind, through its fabric, into darkness, backstage, into the presence of the stacks behind. Free from my body and hovering among the various collections of newsprint and magazines and index-cards and celluloid and folders and microfilm and phone directories and prison records and magnetic tape and muster rolls and on and on, through cages and fridges and racks and shelves and around endless corners, I sense their mass, the pressure and humidity of their desire to push back through the concrete and the rebar, back out into the sunlit present.

The steadicam slides down the lift-shaft to the basement, which is really a partially buried ground floor, and into the museum. History is here, Ohio seen from the perspective of animals and minerals and, of course, humans, both the Europeans who began to call themselves American, and those who were American before the designation existed. There are displays of objects embodying various key moments on the Ohioan time-line, authentic signifiers for public consumption, artefacts like The Mica Hand, with its haunting looping musical accompaniment, and an electrically powered reproduction of a wooden mill, which groans and grinds ghost grain.

Pushing out through the glass and I'm in the parking lot with the highway at my back, hovering at the foot of the cast staircase curving up against the waist of this Brutalist hour-glass. As is often the case, this thing looks simultaneously precarious and impregnable, a massive top-heavy mega-fort erupting from the crest of a sculpted mound. The archives are up there, cantilevered out into thin air in a basement in the sky, wrapped around the reading room, encased in board-marked concrete and coated in a layer of bricks. And there they wait, safe in the darkness and dust, holding their breath.

Dennis McNulty/ January 2014.



The Colours Return to The Surface Of The Earth - Dennis McNulty

Process
For the living. My response is always a burial, rather an upturned crypt above the earth, an inverted groove cast with the trowel in this recording as a long line in concrete through and against the earth. Plastic pipes enter the pavement and are sealed roughly at the edges with the same mix of sand and cement. Inversely, rusted steel spines emerge from crumbled concrete, a salt white crystal sups into the grooves.

This piece is an edited recording of that burial, in premixed fast
setting concrete, the etching or inversion of the last work into a
freshly trowelled layer. It took place at the site of the crypt, above ground. It was buried as far as I remember in Copenhagen, close to the botanical gardens. Or was it in Salo, in the sand beneath the two still catfish, wondered if they were still alive?  I think finally it must have been in the grounds of Salpêtrière, in Paris; a bloom, flush or blossom of saltpeter was scraped from the basement walls there and played back with a stick.

Biography
Martin Howse is occupied with an artistic investigation of the links between the earth (geophysical phenomena), software and the human psyche (psychogeophysics), proposing a return to animism within a critical misuse of scientific technology. Through the construction of experimental situations (within process-driven performance, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works and texts, Martin Howse explores the rich links between substance or materials and execution or protocol, excavating issues of visibility and of hiding within the world. For the last ten years he has collaborated on numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited diversely. He is equally the creator of the skin-driven audio divination module, aka. The Dark Interpreter.

Artist Website
http://1010.co.uk

Soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/martin_howse

Twitter
https://twitter.com/micro_research

Salpêtrière by Martin Howse

Martin Howse's piece led me on a trail of rare earths and ground speak. The earth expresses itself through the plants and trees that spring from it. A geophysical pulse of cyclical growth.

Crystals of sea salt, lemon slices, straight pouring cream and coffee beans. The impact fires flurries of synapses in every direction. They dissolve and erupt on our tongues. But, I wanted to look at the reverse journey; a guttural implosion. This piece uses sounds that are born in the base of our throats and move up through the opening of our mouths into the light. A human xylem transporting from the root to the sprouting green. 

Bio
Rachel Ní Chuinn is an artist who works with sound, text, electronics and radio to explore ideas of touch and movement. Her music has been performed by members of the Crash Ensemble, The Quiet Music Ensemble, This Is How We Fly and the Dublin Laptop Orchestra. Currently she is focusing on self-produced electronic works. 

She performs live both on her own and with the Dublin Laptop Orchestra. She also hosts Cluastuiscint a weekly music show on Raidió na Life and has produced compositional radio documentaries for national broadcast in Ireland and live and community radio events internationally.

www.rachelnichuinn.com

Grass And Nettles And Briars - Rachel Ní Chuinn

I used two throat-like-sounds provided by Rachel and her final mix, but also a few particles of sounds given by girls of Outlandishtheatre platform (I was working simultaneously on something for them and it somehow seeped here) and adding some of my own sounds as basic material to be used for transformative expansion evolving into the final composition. Composed and intercepted by Slavek on 8 - 9th of July 2015, Meath. 

Ansveris (Interception IV)- Slavek Kwi

The idea for this project formed during my time on a music fellowship programme in the Model Niland gallery in Sligo so it felt like a fitting start point to gather sounds from the gallery as a starting point. My motivation for doing this project is to explore unconventional ways for musicians and sound artists to respond to each others ideas.

The gallery building is a beautiful old school built in 1862 and has a wonderful heavy cosy structure with wooden floors throughout so a sonic portrait or homage seemed like the way forward. During my time in the gallery I had access to a resident studio and could also explore the building alone in the evening times which was when I set about collecting sounds from the gallery in winter 2007.

I had planned to first of all focus on sounds that would be most recognisable to the gallery staff. The sounds of everyday working life in the gallery. I suppose my aim here was to build on an already established relationship with these familiar sounds. So I focused on sampling the various doors that are pushed open all day long with that familiar 'squeel' followed by a firm 'shclock' noise as it closes of its own accord. I then moved up to the gallery rooms on the second floor which have wonderful creaking floor boards and sampled my footsteps in a few of the different rooms. I then walked down to the main cafe area and was drawn to the sounds of the fridge from the cafe humming and buzzing with multiple layers of vibrating tones only noticeable when frozen to the spot with ones full attention.

I was then pleased to find the resident grand piano on its side against a wall with its beautiful innner tapestry of strings and bolts exposed so I got busy gathering material from that. Some of the sounds I ended up using were plucked strings also bolts moving and clanking which found their way into the third guitar led part of the piece.

The final piece ended up being a kind of triptych linked together by the sounds of my footsteps around the gallery. The first patterned part of the piece features the tinkling sounds of a small metal chain being trailed across the inner strings of the grand piano placed over a loop segment of footsteps on the wooden gallery floors.

The second passage adopts a similar approach, this time featuring the more prominent sounds of plucked piano strings over different looping footsteps which then trails into sounds from the buzzing fridge from the cafe.
For the third passage in the piece I took a dictaphone recording of a guitar piece I had written around that time with my year in Sligo in mind and played it over the looped sound of one of the main doors in the gallery swinging open and closing. Mechanical clicking noises made from flicking small levers inside the piano feature here too.
trans
I then gathered together what I considered to be the most interesting moments from the piece and isolated the sounds and set them aside for the next relay candidate to respond to in whatever way they saw fit. Be it a literal link, where some of the audio may feature or wether the link was purely conceptual would be entirely up to them.
John Lambert / May 2008 
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

A Year In Sligo  by Chequerboard

The way John (Chequerboard) used his recording of the gallery, which was a space which held some emotional resonance with him, led me to think about how sound can be used to document spaces or objects which have some emotional connection to the person recording them.
Such recordings do not always necessarily convey these emotions to a third party listener. Sound is recorded without the emotional coloration felt by the person who recorded them. It is an objective documentation, whose emotional resonances are felt by those with whom they hold some significant connection.

I think John highlighted this by adding a more ‘musical’ element to his piece which suggests to the listener that the preceding sounds were of some emotional relevance to him. While a recording of an object or space can tell us so much about its physical attributes (size, mass, density, texture etc.) it does not necessarily describe the emotional significance it holds with the person recording them. It can of course, trigger an emotional response in the listener, which may be relevant to their own experiences, which may or may not correlate directly with the original source.

For example, a recording of an empty building might remind a listener of a time when they got lost in an empty building when they were young, or a recording of waves crashing against rocks might trigger memories of time spent by the sea with a loved one.
A lot of my own work tries to explore how these recordings can be used to suggest a particular emotion, or at least lead the listener in a particular direction with regards their emotional response to them. Processing, or manipulation of the sounds, is one way by which the listener can be ‘manipulated’ towards a particular response. Context is another method by which the composer can suggest a particular emotional environment, in which the listener may be placed.
For example, a recording of a buzzing fly set against some birdsong might suggest a summery atmosphere of calm and relaxation, while the same buzzing fly recording with some reverb applied, set against some creaking, tapping sounds, might trigger a more fearful or ominous response.

My own piece attempts to describe an exaggerated sonic portrait, or caricature, of my own empty house while I am sleeping. Playing on the old question of “if a tree falls in the forest…”, I tried to imagine what the house, and various objects in it, (ornaments, cutlery, clocks, the ticking of an alarm sensor) might sound like if it could hear itself as I slept. I imagined these sounds to be completely different to what I might hear were I to be awake listening to it.

When I was a child, I always associated sounds I could hear while going asleep with something completely different to what they actually were. The water gurgling in the pipes became rushing rivers and the sound of the blood pumping in my ears I imagined to be big, clanking factories where hundreds of tiny insect slaves marched to and fro. Stories about how things in a house might come alive as its inhabitants slept always struck a chord with me too.

The piece is an extension of this idea, whereby there is another layer of hidden sonic activity going on just beyond our consciousness. Towards the end of the piece, as I approach waking, the sounds slowly become a more ‘real world’ representation of the house, as if it senses my conscious presence and is afraid of letting me in on its secrets.
Jimmy Behan / July 2008 
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

Untitled by Jimmy Behan

I have long been interested in sleep, the unconscious and the subconscious when it comes to audio, listening and music.  With the birth of my first daughter I became particularly interested in sleep and how to get more of it (I’m sure most parents go through this).  I composed several pieces of simple drone music as an aid to our family to try to help us relax and sleep.  I have no idea if it really worked.  Jimmy’s piece and write up led me back to some of these thoughts about sleep and particularly what role audio plays during sleep, getting us to sleep, meditation, relaxation, dreaming, etc.

Jimmy makes some comments in his write up about sounds detached from the listener.  While Jimmy sleeps he images the sounds being heard by the objects that make them.  This is a beautiful idea in and of itself but what strikes me as interesting is that Jimmy still includes himself in his sonic portrait; a body, lying still and unconscious, perhaps not listening to these sounds but somehow still connected to them.

What role does audio play in aiding sleep?  What role does audio play while we are asleep? These are both interesting questions to me and are central to my relay piece and inspired by Jimmy’s piece and thoughts.


I’ve sampled small portions of Jimmy’s piece and reconstructed them into very simple layered patterns that loop and oscillate.  For me they are the sounds of the process of sleep itself. They are the sounds of a sort of sleep machine, an audio bridge between the conscious and unconscious.
Scott Morgan (Loscil) / September 2008 
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

The Sleep Machine by Loscil

As a continuation/mutation on the scissors theme, I decided before making any compositional processes that I would use 1/4" reel to reel tape and a razor blade as a fundamental medium. I had a few audio files from Pierre which were short but had a common key, so I realised a good place to start would be to create tape loops using Pierre's samples, a razor blade, a splicing block, a chinagraph pencil and some splicing tape. My main machine for playing the tape loops was an Akai valve reel to reel recorder.

I have a reel of tape in my collection which has passed its sell by date by a long shot, the magnetic oxide flakes off with very little friction. The idea of using tape loops which physically deteriorate is obviously associated with William Basinski and his 'Disintegration Loops'. I didn't want to avoid this fascinating process for the sake of avoiding any artistic mimicry, so I thought of other ways to incorporate the ideas of decay into my piece.
I reversed Pierre's samples before transferring them to tape, so when a tape loop was formed, the audio would be reversed and then as the loop played and the result recorded back into the computer, the loop would crumble and decay. Then when several minutes of decaying audio was recorded onto the computer, I would then reverse the whole recording to render Pierre's sample 'forwards' again, but now the decaying or 'disintegration' process has been reversed.
There are two main loops in the piece which use this method, both are made of Pierre's samples. They start off as sparse, broken and crumbled fragments and then eventually build and replenish to become more complete and recognizable, the process is very organic sounding. The tape loops then became the backbone of the piece, they determined the key and mood, the meter is loose and vague however.
My next step was to continue with the decay theme but this time using my favourite vintage digital delay pedal. The pedal allows a 4 second delay which can be set to decay over a fairly long period of time. I used the pedal in this piece to create a continuous electric guitar improvisation. Using the tape loops of Pierre's samples as a 'drone' to follow, I improvised sparsely, building up more intricate cyclic patterns note by note. As the pedal loops, notes crumble and fade into the distance, and new notes are constantly being added, so the building and the decaying is a seamless process which is complemented by the reversed decaying of the tape loops.

Other sound sources in the piece include a small Romanian melody harp and location recordings. The guitar improvisation was also captured to reel to reel tape, and then played back out of the internal speakers of the Akai machine and captured both directly from a line out and with a microphone. To get away from the confines of my studio and to exploit the drama of spring, I took various machines into my garden to recapture the recorded improvisation in a real environment. My set up was surrounded by hedges where birds and insects go about their daily lives, contributing to cycles of birth and decay.

Stephen Wilkinson/ May 2009
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

Hedged In by Bibio

In response to Nocturnes, I thought to wear some noise cancelling headphones and walk the nighttime streets of Paris. Tramping to the relentless beat of one particular Somadrone sample, I recorded my rambles. It drove me on, I couldn't stop.Not being able to hear what I was recording, it all failed to attract my attention. Later, listening back, I heard these curious fragments, these sounds that I had passed, all sorts of things emerging and receding from the nighttime, calling to mind a less than comfortable dream.
I was interested in previous participants' usage of tape and analog techniques. My own route to imperfection and the sound of decay is through a fiddle. I recorded at night, in a chapel, various sounds.

Some random ideas from all this please me. The way Paris is laid out, a fractal, perfect for wandering. A faint and ephemeral sonic map over the city itself, a palimpsest. The discontinuity on looping the sample, so that your foot, having been in a steady beat, takes a moment to find itself.  The way sounds from city and fiddle intersect: a creaking gate matches, by chance, a chance harmonic.  A duet for fiddle and city.  Virtually colouring your perception through your ears.

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh / May 2011
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

The Night & I by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh's beautiful piece "The Night and I" reminded me of the mysterious atmosphere of Paris. Following the idea of things emerging and receding from the city, I recorded some sounds in Venice and the island of Murano. I find Venice rather fascinating and unpredictable. I enjoy very much being lost in its labyrinthic structure, hearing the sound of the space changing radically in few seconds, coming from a very narrow street and ending up in a big square.

Being interested in exploring the acoustic properties of Venice and its surroundings, my idea was to create a kind of unpredictable path through the city, and to place those recorded sounds in an abstract context, allowing them to take different roles between responding to each other, interacting or accompanying.
Some sounds of Caoimhíns piece were processed and started to interact with my sounds in a special way, often creating a mysterious texture where the line between background and foreground becomes blurred. I also recorded the percussionist Orlando Aguilar Velazguez, a guitar, and my own voice. Eventually the piece remains rather abstract and takes the listener into a curious walk through the city. The title recalls Murano's glass factory.

Marie Guilleray / September 2011
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

Soufflerie De Verre by Marie Guilleray

Although not entirely apparent, field recording plays an important role in my work. Either in the form of acoustic inspiration or the subtle inclusion in a textured track. At this time of year ice flows work their way down the Detroit river, a constant zeotrope of frozen water. The sound of the massive sheets of ice colliding creates a perpetual cacophony of textures. After hearing Marie Guilleray's work and understanding that location played a substantial part in her piece, it seemed only logical to pursue a recording that reflected the dissimilarity/similarity between Detroit and Venice.

Once I had captured the sounds from the river I walked into the city in the early evening when most activity ceases for the day and people who inhabit the downtown during work hours vacate and head back to the suburbs. The city becomes a vacant colossus of architecture and concrete. I recorded a few sounds in my short trek all of which were filled with hollow sounding textures with occasional traffic noise. Emulating the pulsing din of a dormant city, I produced a series of frequency modulated sine waves that slowly build gaining in volume and harmonics until they break and recede leaving only the sounds of the river remaining. 

Both Detroit and Venice exist due to their proximity to water but their similarities end there. Unlike Venice's labyrinth of streets, Detroit's downtown is a city that was clearly planned out from it's inception. Streets extend in concentric circles from the city center and there is far less activity or chance for variation. The final recording attempts to replicate both the arch of daily activity and the toneless quality of urban noise. 



Christopher Bissonnette/ February 2012
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

Le Mal Du Siècle by Christopher Bissonnette

I used two field recording sounds from Christophers piece which were recorded by a river and inside the city of Detroit. It made me think of darkness and cold weather which I decided to contrast with sounds I recorded at the seaside in San Francisco when I visited there some years ago - it's like the atmosphere is changing from North to South, from darkness to brightness.
I also included some beats and harmonies towards the end which are more rigid and grid-based, which is a closer reflection of how I feel in Berlin where I'm currently living. I've decided for the title to be "From North to South, then heading East".
Like traveling a long distance over a small passage of time.

Midori Hirano/ May 2012
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

From North to South, then heading East by Midori Hirano

I used the original piano samples from Midori's piece – the whole harmonic structure is based on this, in various degrees of recognition and abstraction. From dark rich glitchiness to icy glacial harmonies and an expanding out through my own singing voice, there is a relentlessness to the way the chords are restated, a sense of being haunted by a feeling or atmosphere, akin to remembering parts of a dream.


Linda Buckley/ October 2012
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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

haunt - Linda Buckley

Linda's piece was so beautiful and haunting that I wanted to make sure the EVPs worked into it with a natural, non-challenging feel.  So I opened up her piece a bit and added some extra depth to widen the composition up a bit to absorb the natural harshness of the EVPs.  I also added some of the phrases in reverse to the overall composition to create an eerie uneasiness without losing that original ethereal appeal. I then carefully chose and placed the EVPs in a way to enhance the overall harmonic rhythm of the work. Some of the EVPs were repeated so the observer might be able to glean some of the actual utterances contained in them.

All the years I've spent in University Libraries I have always felt somehow never quite alone. (I actually fell asleep on the catwalks of the University of Notre Dame's Law Library once and spent the night with some disturbing nightmares!) So with all of the enlightened learning and such that goes on in those quiet and venerable places, I wondered if there wouldn't be some interesting attraction to our post -coil energy that might ebb there. And through my work, I found that the voices are clear, sometimes worried and insightful.

Michael Esposito/ June 2013

Case File 112 is the name given to a body of research undertaken at Purdue University Calumet Campus, Indiana.

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Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com

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