Divine Feedback

On Friday I had a pleasant hour talking locative media in the company of fellow lecturers Ben Dalton and Marc Fabri, blogger Irna Qureshi, Ben Halsall and Megan Smith. It was great to hear other people’s takes on this area and talk binaural sound, GPS and the like before having to cut my part short to collect the kids. Speaking of the kids, here’s the first page of the daughter’s magnum opus:

And… speaking of magnum opuses, Peter Forshaw was on Radio 3’s Night Waves programme a couple of days ago with Jennifer Rampling talking about alchemy to promote the Science Museum’s new exhibition Signs, Symbols, Secrets. This reminded me that Forshaw had a piece entitled Oratorium-Auditorium-Laboratorium: Early Modern Improvisations on Cabala, Music, and Alchemy in Brill’s Aries journal a couple of years ago.

Almias Redivivus

Today I’m hoping to get out and test a work-in-progress geolocative version of Almias. I can’t write much at present, but if things work then I’m sure a download will be forthcoming! Here’s how the basic sound map is looking:

I can still hardly believe that the original Almias project in 2010 came together like it did. As noted in the review in Northern Earth, it was a real labour of love and probably my favourite project thus far.

Edit: Test complete – all works seamlessly!

A Prism, A Montage, A Conference

It was nice to be alerted to this piece on the Active Listener blog in which Grey Malkin from The Hare and the Moon chooses ten desert island discs, amongst them A Prism for Annwn:

This is a perfect album that I will never get bored of; I find something new in it each time I listen to it.

Aw, how nice! It was a highlight for me in all ways (musically, technically, spiritually) too.

Meanwhile, I’ve done a guest blog at Sounding the Deep about working with the ambisonic mix of the performance and editing it down to a ten minute ‘montage’ – read here, or listen below!

I’m also currently doing my second master’s degree at Huddersfield University, looking at the practicalities of combining oral history, sonic art and locative media. I’m very happy to say that a paper with Simon Bradley entitled Located Memory and the Realisation of Place has just been accepted  for the Spaces of (Dis)Location conference at Glasgow University in May!

IAO IOSAS!

My new group, The Institute of Stone Age Sex (IOSAS), is playing on the 11th of May at the Temple Works’ Why Rush? festival. I think we might also be lined up to do a ritual vowel singing workshop.

I’m very pleased with how the sound of IOSAS is developing. After the ‘communal psych’ seven-piece lineup that we started with, things are now solidifying around a quartet of myself (vox/accordion/wind instruments), Layla Smith (vox/harmonium) and dual cellos from Simon Bradley and Briony Yorke. In the interests of documentary, there are a few brief excerpts from a recent rehearsal below. A couple of compilation appearances are lined up for the very near future!

One of the pieces we’ve been working on is a version of O! What do ye Wesh i’ the Beck?, a Yorkshire dialect poem by George Cowling. A version of this song also appeared on the XETB lp The Pyrognomic Glass, at the end of side A (entitled Abital). Layla also discovered the poem independently and sang her own version accompanied by Briony to the bones of Mary Bateman at the Thackray Museum.

Diver Go Down

Last week I edited all the Shoals recordings from Sounding the Deep. They’re now on Youtube to listen to and I’ll post my favourite here: Deep Sea Diver. This was originally written for a youth choir, but in the final performance was sung by two sopranos – both of whom have wonderful voices: Yu Min Lim’s beautiful early music voice suits the piece perfectly.

Hallucinatory Reflections on Twelve Tapes

Last week I joined Seth Cooke, Adam Denton, Kevin Sanders and Layla Smith in a twelve hour performance of Twelve Tapes, a composition of indeterminate duration and instrumentation coordinated by Seth Cooke. This first performance took place in Gallery II at Bradford University. I’d previously visited Gallery II in connection with  my cross-disciplinary research group Music and Textiles Interact, having written the Active Notation system for Nigel’s keyboard work Fifteen Images.

Seth has started compiling an archive of the performance, including a full recording of the twelve hours along with Layla’s photographs over at Bang the Bore, but I wanted to use this opportunity to share some of my own thoughts on the experience.

Fathoming the Deep

Today I’ve been in the studio at Leeds Met mixing and editing the ambisonic recordings of Sounding the Deep, which were made at the premiere by Dr. Robert Mackay of Hull University. Sounding the Deep was a very ambitious project put together by Nigel Morgan and Hull Philharmonic Orchestra. As part of my work with Tonality Systems Press over the last eight years I’ve worked closely with Nigel on a number of projects as a copyist, editor, sound designer, recordist and technologist. I’ve been working behind the scenes on Sounding the Deep in various capacities: negotiating tight deadlines for the scores and parts, preparing educational resources (auditory, notated and written) and even writing the odd Pure Data patch and Processing application… it was also a great pleasure to work on a libretto, since writing (particularly poetry) is a growing concern at present.

So, now we’re finally wrapping things up in time for the final project evaluation. I’ve spent much of the time not tweaking levels and waiting for waveforms to render getting a feel for the musical material available: two complete performances of the central (40 minute) work for bass voice and orchestra, and two complete recordings of the Shoals cycle for student ensembles.

There’ll be more reflections on this project later, post-evaluation. Meanwhile, here’s a rough montage of the main orchestral work.

Lark Ascending

I’m finally getting round to consolidating the last decade of recording and writing. Expect all the action to take place here. Larkfall.co.uk will essentially become a file-store and occasional space to do things outside the blog format. The Tintinnalogia blog will wind down shortly.

     – Phil