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

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

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

Reconstructing The Incredible by Polly Fibre

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

The idea is to imply a sense of interruption by creating sets and sub-sets of little tranquil audio components that can be switched between, brutally and abruptly. Each audio component (or loop) contains a sense of movement in order to emphasise the disturbance when it is switched on/off, so I recorded and processed instruments to convey temporal fluctuation. For example, some of the material includes exponentially plucked banjo, fwd/bwd looping piano chords, filtered random noise and wobbling analogue synthesizer.

The medium of tape was of huge significance to the Bibio piece. I took that as my starting point and considered the mechanics of the medium. The grainy residue of his recorded elements was very characteristic, so i decided to smooth this out while retaining the harmonic values and brought them into the digital realm. This gave me a collection of chords to build my own loops over.

It struck me that when you pause a tape machine, the next time you press play the recording begins from where it was interrupted. Most digital samplers will always revert to the start of a recording when you pause them, so I assembled some software to enable a tape machine-like playback. Using a computer enabled me to set up a live performance environment in which I could instinctively switch between hundreds of little audio components.
I am very interested in generative techniques in music composition and this set-up provided an infinite number of loop combinations, as there was no syncing or governing tempo. The contact points between the loops being turned on and off became the central theme to the performance and suggested either a series of conveyor belts or a complex system of switches.

As I was cultivating wild facial hair during the building of the performance so I called it "A Beard of Mercury Switches".

Dunk Murphy / September 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

A Beard Of Mercury Switches by Sunken Foal

The scissors in Polly Fibre's piece reminded me of some traditional African bands using this object as a percussive instrument. They also reminded me of my own scissors player that I built about twelve years ago. While listening to 'Reconstructing The Incredible' it rapidly became obvious that my response should incorporate some of Polly Fibre's beautiful sounds to introduce my robotic scissors. I also liked the idea that the little sound sculpture makes the rhythms of my piece visible, while Polly Fibre made the editing of her piece audible.

In 1997 and 1998 I used to perform with the scissors player. The other mechanical members of the band at that time were playing a tea-pot, a comb, an ash-tray, some pliers, a letter scale, a whisk and some tooth-brushes. The pliers and the whisk don't belong to me anymore, they are now replaced by a saw and a glass of water. I still see and hear the ensemble from time to time when I exhibit it as an installation, but it has been a long time without playing along with it.
This recent session with the scissors player was like meeting an old friend I had not talked to for ten years! Little by little I got to remember its qualities and its uneasy sides: how steadily it can play, on every tempo, with a smooth groove; and how difficult it is for the human part of the band, when you once decided that crrrrr would be the beat, to concentrate all along on the crrrrr without being disturbed by the tic and the frrrhhh nearby, that are constantly seducing you and putting you on the wrong track...

In order to feature the scissors as well as possible, the tempo of the piece speeds up four times, then slows down four times, for the human musician on prepared trumpet and Mangbetu harp kundi to follow and adapt as quickly as possible. The vocal part is also mechanical: a transformed record player samples a 7 inches disc, in a more or less synchronised way. The piece is built on eight segments of sixteen bars each, with an eight-bar final part.
Polly Fibre's scissors start it up and cut it down, as if it were a parenthesis in the 'Relay' process.

Pierre Bastien / March 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

Play Scissors Play by Pierre Bastien

'Within The Glass Temple' began with a two hour live improvisation in response to fragments from the Sunken Foal track 'Beard of Mercury Switches'. We played various instruments, including guitar, piano, xylophone, bells and self made instruments in combination with field recordings, samples and live processing. From this session we constructed a sequence of the most intriguing segments and decided to listen to them over a couple of weeks with the notion of returning to the studio to do further treatments. Final work on the track was completed a month or so later when we regrouped in the studio and restructured the track with electronic processing and some new compositional elements.

The title itself evolved in a similar improvisory fashion to the music. Over the years we shared an interest in sacred, temple-like spaces: a clearing deep in the forest, an abandoned factory, or the white walls of a gallery. We often incorporate materials found in these places into our creative projects. Many of the sounds that we shaped during the studio process seemed to evoke the ceremonial, whilst others suggested glass-like, delicate and tenuous moods. In this context the temple becomes our meeting place, in which we can communicate through the medium of sound. Through here emanates music from within the glass temple.

On this occasion Projector Collective are John Carter, Anthony Kelly, Jay Roche, David Stalling.

Projector Collective / September 2010
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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

Within The Glass Temple by Projector Collective

In 'And Then Replaced' I tried to respond to 'Within The Glass Temple' by Projector Collective, keeping in mind some ideas by previous participants, mostly about sleep, and tape usage. I started by cutting samples provided by Projector Collective, attempting to simplify and slow down their composition, subtracting and layering sounds I liked. After a while I came up with few short loops, which then, by means of various analog and digital processing formed this slow sleepy track. I also recorded the process of recording - audible tape recorder motor and acoustic imperfections of my small studio - which were later added to the final mix.


Szymon Kaliski / October 2010
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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 Colours Return to The Surface Of The Earth - Dennis McNulty

The Relay Project

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