This piece began when I met several artists and makers from across Scotland in 2021 and recorded the sounds of them working in their studios. I’ve always had a love for art and have an interest in the processes involved in their creation. Specifically, I became interested in the spaces in which the artists that I met worked, and how they told a story about that artist and their work. In each studio the artist’s methods, thought processes and inspirations were frozen in time - like a still life painting.
Maker explores the relation between art and the space in which it was conceived by using the sounds I captured from the artists working in their studios, and exploring how their movement, layering and sense of time can be manipulated to produce shapes and forms of their own. 

Contributors

Chris and Michaela Goan at seatree argyll 
https://seatreeargyll.com/
seatreeargyll on Facebook and Instagram

Joanne Macfadyen - Jeweller and founder of Tea Green Events 
https://www.teagreen.co.uk/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teagreenevents/?hl=fr
https://www.joannemacfadyen.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joannemacfadyen/?hl=fr 

Kirsten Manzi - Jewellery Designer (Kirsten Manzi Jewellery Design)
www.kirstenmanzi.co.uk
Instagram: @kirstenmanzijewellerydesign
Facebook: @kirstenmanzijewellery

Ylva Saleem at YlvasCorner
https://ylvascorner.co.uk/
https://www.cowalopenstudios.co.uk/artist/yiva-saleem/

Shirley Torrance - botanic printing
https://www.cowalopenstudios.co.uk/artist/shirley-torrance/

Chris Viviani at Clod & Pebble 
https://www.clodandpebble.com

a selection of the sound recordings used to create this piece have been uploaded to Song Work, an audio library of workplace noise created by Siôn Parkinson with help from Andy Truscott. See https://songwork.org/about for further info

© Tom Macfadyen, 2022 - all rights reserved

Maker

Dear listener

In January 2022 we set out to compose a sonic art piece together, following a set of rules we had agreed upon. The most important rule being that the piece should be composed solely by sending sound recordings and edits back and forth - a sort of sound notes or letters - while never discussing the work verbally with each other. We broke many of the rules but never this one. We also exchanged visual materials - graphic scores and movement improvisations - to support the development of the piece. Yet, at the centre of the collaboration remained a sonic dialogue in which we searched for each other, listened, shared stories, misheard each other, concocted, and blended our thoughts into one big nonsense smoothie. The GIFt of the GAB is the noisy offspring of that rambling conversation. Hope you enjoy.

Sincerely,

Tom & Anne

The GIFt Of The GAB

RIG (electric guitar and live electronics) is inspired by ‘re-amplification’: the process of recording a direct signal from the guitar to be sent to amplifiers later. In RIG, this process is automated with the use of computer signal processing, along with complex overdubbing sequences to produce a unique sound world. Six speakers are spread across the stage, each with a different tonal quality reflecting different guitar amplifiers. As the sound moves around the space, subtle changes in tone are produced.

RIG - Binaural Mix (headphones Recommended)

'readymades' explores the sounds of broken, disused, and deconstructed musical instruments. The ensemble programmed for this performance have been recorded and reshaped as granular textures that crack, splinter and degrade as the piece progresses. Whilst the tape part explores the inevitable breaking down of ordered structures, the live aspect of this work demonstrates the potential for re-invention. For this piece I built instruments constructed from old, rejected and broken bits of instruments that I have collected, and the material for this composition was the result of improvisation and experimentation with these curious amalgamations, using amplification to explore their most microscopic sounds.

Performed by Calum Huggan as part of PLUG Festival 2024 at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Tom Macfadyen

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