Weights and Measures: Alchemy, Harmony, Geomancy and Music

This post is a follow up to the idle observations on alchemy and music previously posted as Divine Feedback. What follows is, likewise, idle observation and speculation, but perhaps an interesting starting point for something more rigorous…

Harmony and proportion were major guiding principle for medieval and Renaissance aesthetics. In the case of the alchemy suggested by the Khunrath engraving (mentioned in the above post) it seems that the suggestion is that alchemical work relates to harmony: presumably the proportions of materials and astrological timings of operations should be harmonically concordant (and by extension harmonious in sound). There is the tantalising notion that, by harmonising their preparations and processes and sounding them out, alchemists could have been the earliest practitioners of a form of data sonification!

A Musical Interlude: Pastorales for Summer Flute

“The mind says one thing. But how will you fool the soul?”
– Imants Zemzaris

It looks like I’ve got plenty to write about in the next week or so: a reflection on the Spaces of (dis)Location conference, a follow up to the Divine Feedback posting, a review of Mandragora and some pieces relating to my Huddersfield research…

… and I’m certain that Pastorales for Summer Flute by Imants Zemzaris will be the soundtrack to some of this activity. I first heard this piece around 18 months ago during a rekindling of my love for contemporary organ music: the flutes in this case are the beautiful, mellow and clear flute pipes of the organ.

A Musical Interlude: Treeness

A brief post by way of taking a break from preparing our conference presentation for Spaces of (Dis)Location next week.

I’d like to share a piece of music by Nigel Morgan, entitled Treeness. I produced this recording of HengChing Fang (viola) and Daniel Gordon (chamber organ) playing in Wakefield Cathedral in around 2008. I’m very fond of this piece and the memories of the session – two superb musicians. The score itself is based on the algorithmic use of L-Systems – more information here.

This recording is (as far as I am aware!) available on CD as an accompaniment to A-R Editions’ A-Life for Music: Music and Computer Models of Living Systems.

Musicking

The Institute of Stone Age Sex held their second public session on Friday at the Temple Works‘ Why Rush? festival. Here are some photos. Perhaps some selected musical highlights will follow. Meanwhile, here are some selected images taken by Simon Cliff:

The Crystal in Men’s Heads

My copy of Scarlet Imprint’s Mandragora arrived last week. I’ll post a full response to it presently, once I’ve been able to more fully acquaint myself with the contents, but needless to say it’s a high quality publication. The paperback version is now in stock, with the digital version to follow at the end of June.

One of the essays contained in Mandragora is Peter Grey’s A Spell to Awaken England, an enlightened survey of the magical and shamanic aspects of Ted Hughes’ work. I’ll have more to say about this and the other essays later, but while I ruminate here are some informal reflections on Hughes’ Heptonstall that I wrote last winter. Photographs by Layla.

Abstraction

Second update in a day – the fun train never stops! The abstracts for the Spaces of (Dis)location conference have been published and collected here. Here’s ours!

Simon Bradley and Phil Legard

Located Memory and the Realisation of Place

Simon Bradley and Phil Legard discuss their continuing work on location-based public events chiefly concerned with personal responses to place. They explore how their methods enable the development of public events that allow for a distributed construction of meaning that is shared between artist and attendee. Arising from these concerns Simon and Phil’s current work considers strategies involving fragmented narratives, embodied narratives and locative media for the creative delivery of oral history within a philosophy that assumes the codependence of memory and place.

Holbeck Manifest!

Tomorrow, Friday the 11th, at 6:30pm:

The Institute of Stone Age Sex

Deliver a session of ritual rural arcana here:

“Scowan urla grun!”

More information here!

Field Testing

On Friday afternoon, Simon and I took the Almias app up to the crag itself to test it and to record sound and video to accompany our rapidly approaching conference. Things all worked really well – looking forward to editing it into some kind of video – but for now here’s a couple of pics and a bit of sound! (Hiss to be cleaned up – it seemed to come off the headphone splitter, not the app!)

This was probably the first time I’d had a significant chance to listen back to the music we recorded on location back in 2010… I have to say that I think it worked beautifully – sounds truly born of the location and impossible to separate from it.

Publicating

Spring is here, new releases and publications are beginning to proliferate!

Last night I went to the John Butcher/Gino Robair/Paul Hession gig at Left Bank, organised by Seth Cooke, where I unexpectedly bumped into Clive Henry who runs the Journal of the Belgae Folk Club micro-label. In another unexpected turn he was carrying a box full of booklets and CDs that comprise the BangTheBore Here compilation! This is a double CD and booklet of location recordings, music and improvisations from around the country (and even a couple of pieces hailing from beyond our shores). Layla and I made our own rather lo-fi contribution in the form of vowel singing in West Kennet Long Barrow. I’m really pleased by the diversity of approaches to place and sound on these CDs – an incredibly inventive collection of recordings all round. At present I’m not sure how to get a copy of this, but if you’re interested perhaps post a message on the BangTheBore forum.

Clive’s Journal of the Belgae Folk Club releases are also miniature baroque masterpieces – here’s a copy of the Astral Social Club release that I picked up last night, beautifully executed!

I was also happy (ecstatic!) to find out today that Scarlet Imprint‘s new poetry anthology Mandragora has been printed, bound and delivered to the publishers! The book itself, bound in copper shot crushed cloth looks beautiful, and contains the work of 48 poets along with nine essays – one by myself. I’m very much looking forward to reading the work of the poets as well as the diverse essays which seem to cover ground from Celtic traditions to contemporary cut-ups.

Almias Code Quarry

An unexpected day off gave me a chance to progress a bit on the app version of Almias. The finished app will be launched to coincide with Harrogate International Festival, and perhaps there’ll even be an Almias/IOSAS performance as part of the fringe!

Spent some time tweaking the existing locative sound loops (purple in the image below) and generative systems (blue). Almias is really just a test case for a locative audio platform I’m developing (currently codenamed Loam), and today I also threw around some ideas for creating an editor using the Google Maps API:

The app also has some graphics now, which make it a bit more pleasing than a black screen:

And a cute icon!

Looking forward to going up the crag tomorrow for a field test, followed by an IOSAS practice!