Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Explore the project in full at www.relayproject.com 

Commissioned by The Model (Sligo) as part of model::offsite programme in 2009, Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). The concept being to create a chain or collection of music pieces by Irish and international artists where each work is directly influenced by the one before, creating an open ended but linear, conversation of ideas. On finishing their work each artist is asked to gather a cluster of sounds from their track for the next participant who is free to include them or not. Some responses are purely conceptual. The project is set to continue indefinitely.

The Relay Project

Murmur

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.
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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 of both Jimmy and Scott's ideas around the subject of sleep I tried to create something which represents the process of dreaming. It's a response to their work, a kind of release to the tension they created. If their music focused on the sound of places where we sleep or the transition into sleep from a conscious state then my piece is roughly intended as a kind of musical visitation, something which happens in the mind after we fall to sleep, –like a distant radio transmission rising out of silence and filling the void for a just short time.
One of the things which interests me most on this subject is the notion of 'dream memories', –memories of things which never happened or never could have happened, it's strange how our minds can hold onto these things and how real they actually feel sometimes regardless of their surreality. When it comes to being creative, I'd like to think that our dreams play a big part in informing the work we do.
My piece uses a small section of Scott's drone sounds which comes in about mid-way and is fairly mutated. This gave me just enough spark to form my own ideas. Mostly what you hear is some simple half-playing on ukulele, I wanted to put forward the power of suggestion. Also, I felt that a loose flow in the piece best suited the theme of dreaming.
Thomas Haugh (Hulk) / October 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

Nightly Sweetly by Hulk

An ongoing pursuit in my work is to attempt to engage haptically with things that are considered virtual. This piece is essentially a reconstruction of Hulks samples, using scissors sounds to cut into his digital audio. The original samples are arranged tightly together by basically starting them all at the same point and from this a loop is created and repeated throughout. Scissors samples are layered over this and a crude edit made at the point of each closing of the blades.

Polly Fibre / January 2009