This sound piece was made by the artist Stephen Rennicks with original recordings of W.B. Yeats reciting his poem 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' followed by two stanzas from 'Coole and Ballylee'. The first version of this piece was dubbed onto a cassette which was buried at a site somewhere in the Northwest of Ireland where strange and supernatural things are claimed to occur. Commonly referred to as the Zone, it is known that Yeats visited and was inspired by this place as a young man. After a year this tape was retrieved and uploaded. More information on this project here http://thezonedoesnotexist.wordpress.com/

'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand by the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

'Coole and Ballylee' (two stanzas)

Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
From somebody that toils from chair to chair;
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old Marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
Great rooms where travelled men and children found
Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.

Another Emblem There!

A track from an EP, The Zone Does Not Exist (2014) by Secret Society. It was released as part of an art project of the same name by Stephen Rennicks. It can be heard in full and purchased from this link.
http://secretsocietyae.bandcamp.com/album/the-zone-does-not-exist
http://thezonedoesnotexist.wordpress.com/

Secret Society - Zone Of Hearts Desire

This is the opening track from the last album I did as Secret Society, There (2006). The album can be previewed in full and purchased at this link.
http://secretsocietyae.bandcamp.com/album/there

Secret Society - Dangerous Door

A track from the second Memory Cells album, We Have Found The New Jerusalem (2001). The album can be previewed in full and purchased at this link. It was also used for a split 7" with Americhord (the producer of that album) for Road Relish the same year.
http://memorycells.bandcamp.com/album/we-have-found-the-new-jerusalem

"This boldly titled recording is the second album from Memory Cells, and marks a big leap in confidence for the band. Produced by Maura O'Boyle, it sees the group relocating from the bedroom to the studio, and making the jump from 2 to 16 tracks. The same musical building blocks remain in place, however: the spectral lines of guitar, the melancholic keyboard swathes, the fragmentary percussives. But whereas Memory Cells were previously hesitant, reluctant to commit, with this recording they boldly stake their claim. Designed for ambient listening in the true sense and to be perceived as one piece rather than a collection of songs, the stated intention is to evoke a sense of mystery, timelessness and cosmic engagement. The scope of their imagination is impressive, the breadth of their ambition laudable, the scale of their achievement not to be underestimated. Like their cited mystical influences, Memory Cells find heaven in a wild flower and eternity in a grain of sand. Going one better though than first century Gnostics, C.G. Jung, the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls or William Blake, this Dublin three-piece also find spiritual fulfillment through abstract semi-electronic instrumental sounds. Simple, sparse and resolutely hypnotic, this is 'time-and-place' music, suitable for late night meditative introspection. A good accompaniment to thoughtful silence, a bad soundtrack for a Saturday night out - unless you intend sitting on a rock in the desert, that is. Memory Cells may not literally have found that fabled, mystical city but with this recording they have certainly advanced a few steps closer." 
Lee Casey, Dublin Event Guide

Memory Cells - The Slow Flash

A track from No People Here by Memory Cells. Originally the soundtrack to an Ambient video release shot by Stephen Rennicks while he and fellow group members Anthony Carroll and Adrienne Flynn recorded their debut album Night, It was remastered and released as a CDR in 2004. It can be previewed in full and purchased at this link.
http://memorycells.bandcamp.com/album/no-people-here

"Originally the soundtrack to an Ambient VHS video release shot by Stephen Rennicks while he and fellow group members Anthony Carroll and Adrienne Flynn recorded their 2000 debut album Night, No People Here is available on CD for the first time. Formed in 1999 in the bedroom of a Dublin council house, Memory Cells broke up in May 2001 at the end of their one and only gig in Belfast, which must have been quite an event. The moody and muted scintillation of their home recordings , preserved for memory in fetching handmade sleeve art, suggests a trio destined for interesting things. Rennicks, for example went on to make a short film about Richard Shaver, whose early writings in Amazing Stories helped prepare America for the flying saucer scares of the 1950s." 
Ken Hollings, The Wire

Memory Cells - Acid Year

This was a sound piece I did in collaboration with Melissa Agate for Transit, the Visual Arts programme for the 2004 ESB Dublin Fringe festival which was curated by Mark Garry and Ciara Healy and featured work by Rhona Byrne, Rem Koolhaas +OMA, Tim Lloyd, Glen Loughran, Yvonne McGuinness, Gavin Murphy, Praxis and Linda Quinlan. 'The exhibition includes a series of artistic interventions in various transitional venues throughout the city. On these platforms and waiting rooms of these timeless, in-between spaces, fixed identities are transformed and imagined communities continue the process of re-imagining themselves."

I and London based artist Melissa Agate (sAnso-xtro) were invited to record and exchange audio recordings from our local train stations and make a piece from this source. Each of our tracks were put onto a CD which was included with the Transit catalogue. 

I also wrote a short text about my sound piece which was included in an Information Hub which was set up at Temple Bar Galleries for Transit during the festival. An edited version of this text made it into the catalogue and pretty much summed up what I was trying to do with the piece but I went digging in my archives and found a copy of the actual text, This section of it goes into more detail about what I was trying to do with my piece in relation to the theme. "On hearing Melissa's material I wondered why I was finding it so easy to visualise what I was hearing. I soon came to realise that the whole sonic environment of a railway station has been designed with the blind in mind. Alarms and announcements are useful but not strictly necessary for the sighted; becoming more information we tend to tune out until they become more noise. I have with repetition teased out these sounds and layered them beside the more obvious discordant rhythms of the constantly moving train...(about the end of the piece) There's something about electric trains you can only sense in near silence, electricity is mysterious. At these moments a mood of calm can descend on a station, as plain to the sighted as the blind. Increasingly I find myself coming to the conclusion that learning ways and strategies to find that universal mood of calm and contemplation in every moment of waking life, within its general clatter, should surely be our goal. To achieve this feat might be enlightenment itself or a step towards it."  

http://www.stephenrennicks.wordpress.com/

Stephen Rennicks - Trains For The Blind

This is an edit of a 20 minute track, 'Time', I made in 2005 for my Costello Memorial Chapel project.  I saw the tiny chapel in the centre of Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim(built in 1877) as a recorder of time. With this in mind I recorded sounds leaking into the chapel(which was closed to the public at the time)and constructed the piece out of this material. I made 50 copies on CDR and over the next two months left them anonymously on the door, two at a time, for the pubic to take. A website address was included in its artwork which would bring people to my text about the project (which was also printed in the local paper)and some images of the chapel and links to its history etc. The piece was later included in a group exhibition at The Dock Arts Centre in the town.
http://www.stephenrennicks.wordpress.com/

Stephen Rennicks - Time (Edit)

I lived in the Marymount apartments in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim in 2005 to early 2007. This was before the economic crash and there were still plenty of foreign workers and their families coming to live and build places such as Marymount while other mostly building work in the town was plentiful. Before I left I made a sound piece from material I recorded there while thinking about the concept of home. I burned 50 copies of it onto CDR and deposited one into the letterbox of each apartment and gave the rest to friends. It was also included in a group show in The Dock Arts Centre in the town later that year. The artwork included a short text (extract below). 

Temporary Residence/At Marymount (A Souvenir)(2006)
"All sounds used in 'Temporary Residence' were recorded as heard from the courtyard area and can be seen as an audio snapshot of a typical summer day here this year. It starts with the dawn chorus, children playing (one of their number being a persistent basketball bouncer) and even the grass being mowed. All of these parts make up the whole as they do in real life also, itself another temporary state...When I first moved here I was struck by how many foreign and to me sadly incomprehensible languages I heard drifting past my window or down the stairwells but more importantly how quickly these new voices and faces would disappear to be replaced by others as people moved on...Home, by necessity, is becoming more a state of mind than an actual location. Which is no bad thing, better to have it as a state of mind than no sense of it at all. Perhaps some of the adult residents view Marymount and its many duplicates throughout the country as just a place to exist while they work and dream of the day they have their own home, having at best held a door or said hello to their neighbours as they passed each other in their time here. But it's quite obvious from how the children of these places behave and interact so well together that for them it is far more than that. So make yourself at home, everywhere, wherever you exist."
http://www.stephenrennicks.wordpress.com/

Stephen Rennicks - Temporary Residence

I made this sound piece from the sea area forecast broadcast on RTE Radio 1 on 9th March 2009 and was thinking about the rapidly changing economic forecast for Ireland and the world at the time. I've always loved just listening to the Irish sea area forecast (not always understanding it)and am also very interested in the seeming randomness of numbers and chaos theory. In fact chaos theory itself actually came from the study of weather statistics and trying to look for patterns in it and people have tried to find similar patterns in the numbers of the stock exchange. Nothing ever stays the same.

At the time I did make a video of stills to go with this on YouTube (before Soundcloud)which I like but it was originally meant to work as a sound piece only. It can still be viewed at this link.
http://youtu.be/GMhnelJ-XDE
http://stephenrennicks.wordpress.com

Stephen Rennicks - Flux

This is a sound piece I made for Strange Attractor: Myth, Mystery and the Miraculous (2015).

I was thinking about possible locations of the ‘miraculous’ and remembered that Bas Jan Ader originally used lyrics from the song 'Searchin' by The Coasters in the first part of In Search of the Miraculous. As this would be somewhere different for everybody I searched for lyrics from songs with ‘somewhere’ in the title and used them in a sound piece as a kind of response to ‘Searchin’. I also incorporated recordings of the wind and sea from Coney Island in the background.

http://strangeattractor-mmm.tumblr.com/

Stephen Rennicks - Somewhere

In the first part of my Black Lough Trilogy(2006) I left a stack of CDRs with this track at the end of a trail to a lost lake in Co. Roscommon. The project was about making a choice between imagination and reality and perhaps discovering something we had forgotten in the process. The project was also concerned with the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, who said that we live in a state of sleep and that we need to keep inventing new alarm clocks to wake each other up (as we become so quickly immune to them). This was my attempt to playfully create a sound piece to do just that. I also included an edited version of this track on the Secret Society album Extra Hour (2006).
http://www.stephenrennicks.wordpess.com

Stephen Rennicks - New Alarm Clocks

I've been doing an Artist Residency at Sligo Folk Park and one of the interesting overlooked things I found there in a storeroom was a type of flexi-disc which was produced sometime in the 1960s by Guinness called 'Memories of Ireland'. It's essentially an advert for them which also promotes Ireland as a tourist destination in a very nostalgic and clichéd way. It is narrated by Val Joyce, who was with RTE Radio for 50 years and in fact only left the station in 2006. As there was a split in this copy of the disc (which is attached to a printed card background) this created a natural loop effect for each of the record's grooves. 

With this playful sound collage I wanted to salvage and share what I could of the recording, subvert its original purpose somewhat and allow this random glitch to reveal its own surprises from the mixture of advertising copy, music and archival recordings. 

http://stephenrennicks.wordpress.com
http://sligofolkpark.com/

Stephen Rennicks - Memories

I found the cassette of Clannad's album,  Macalla, in an abandoned house very close to where I took the red thread photo, while working on, Future Memory: An Experiment with Time. 

If there was to be a soundtrack to this project, I could see this slowed down version of ‘Harry’s Game’ (1983) by Clannad, that I made, being used at some point. This is one of those songs that whenever I unexpectedly hear it, always sends me right back to the eternal now of my childhood. While ‘Harry’s Game’ itself does not appear on Macalla (1985), I love the cover by Anton Corbijn. Even how it is cropped here does not take away its mysterious power. 

While today Clannad's 'Celtic Mysticism' is much maligned (watch Intermission), I respect how they successfully managed to originate their own very authentic sound.

https://future-memory.tumblr.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clannad

Clannad - Harry's Game (Slowed Down)

So far a mixture of archived sound art pieces of mine plus music I did as Secret Society and as a member of Memory Cells. More details with each track.

Stephen Rennicks

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