Towards a Platform

The Holbeck Audiowalk app will hopefully be launched next week – just one small piece of field-testing is required. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on the next stage of the LOAM project: developing the stand-alone, open platform. I’ll post more information about the project as a whole presently, but in essence it will allow historians (oral and otherwise) as well as sound artists a straightforward and dedicated platform for creating locative audio experiences. Users will be able to create content in Google Earth as well as reading databases and transcriptions generated by Stories Matter or Transana.

Today I’ve had a successful session working on the Google Earth/KML parsing element. Paths, polygons and placemarkers (comprising sonic resources and transcription data) are all supported. Graphical overlays to follow!

Coding Holbeck

A very productive day working on the new app version of the Holbeck Audiowalk. This app contributes to prototyping work on the more complex LOAM platform by developing the ‘guide’ layer – a series of narrations (sound files) and directions (text files) which will become the uppermost layer of the locative audio-driven experiences we hope to develop in the future. The new app also implements polygons and other overlays, which will also be coupled with the interactive map points that were implemented in Almias.

Here’s a little screenshot (typo correction and textual tightening pending!) – hopefully have the first release in a fortnight and then I can begin some work on LOAM proper!

Three Spirits Manifest!

The form of  Three Spirits, the new Xenis Emputae Travelling Band album has finally coalesced! Demos will be sent to my favourite labels over the next month or so. If you are reading this and are interested in releasing it, please get in touch via the comments or email me: phil <squiggle> larkfall <d0t> co <d0t> uk.

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band: Three Spirits

I – Arc of Difference (8:40)
II – Hidden Seam & Lode-Ford (5:24)
III – The Great Chord (11:32)
IV – Edi Beo Thu Heven Quene (4:47)
V – Littlebeck Trisagion (15:35)
……i. Elicona
……ii. Invocation
……iii. Almazim

Section of graphic score from track III, The Great Chord.

Phil Legard, harmonium, guitar, flute, recorder, percussion, aeolian modulator, psaltry, voice. Layla Smith, voice. Simon Bradley, cello.

Recorded at Leeds, Staups Moor, Littlebeck Wood, West Kennet Long Barrow, Thurgoland, 2010-12.

Staups Moor, by Layla Smith.

Mandragora

“Poetry is a very stupid thing to be good at. Poems are basically like dreams – something that everybody likes to tell other people but nobody actually cares about when it’s not their own.” – Nadine

“It’s magic – it’s not about magic, it’s not like magic: It IS magic. It’s real magic. […] Incantations, spells, ceremonies, rituals – what are they? They’re poems. So, what’s a poet? He’s a shaman, that’s what he is. A fucking good poem is a weapon. Not like a pop gun. It’s like a bomb. A bloody big bomb.” – Ted (Hughes)

Two quotes from fairly recent films – respectively Tiny Furniture and Sylvia – that perhaps sum up two different attitudes to poetry. We might even harbour both opinions: to me, something like David Jones’ The Tutelar of the Place  is a ‘bomb’ – a poem that, as Kafka so lucidly put it, is the axe to the frozen sea inside me – a violent, emotive force. On the other hand, I regret to say that most poetry I encounter – as with all art forms – unfortunately falls into the ‘boring dream’ category. It is a tortuous and hard won prize to be a poet, a title which many assume all too eagerly.