Musical Interlude: Ingram Marshall

Recently I’ve become entranced by the music of Ingram Marshall. I discovered his Fog Tropes  (1981) quite by chance while exploring some of the links in Philip Clark’s piece on New Tonality (- or should that be ‘New’ New Tonality?) in the Gramophone.

Immediately I found myself at home in the misty, murky sound world that the piece evokes through the use of a brass ensemble accompanied by a ‘fog’ of field recordings gathered around the San Francisco Bay area. Marshall says in his own note on the piece: “Many people are reminded of the San Francisco Bay when they hear this music but for me it is a piece about memory and the feeling of being lost” – perfectly meandering music which captures the weird chiaroscuro of fog and faded memories.

Disembodied Narratives

It’s been fairly busy around here, preparing for the wedding along with research and some fairly demanding teaching has taken up a large portion of time recently.  I am immensely grateful to Layla for taking the lead on the wedding with her brilliant organisational skills when I was often deluged and disorientated by my workload.

However, I’ve found a bit of time to do other things over the last few weeks:

Almias app, credit: Layla Legard

First, I was honoured to be asked to be a guest speaker to students of interaction design at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, where Ben Dalton was leading a course on geolocation and mobile media. This was a great opportunity to talk about my work with Simon Bradley, the development of LOAM (more on that presently), Almias, field recording, philosophies for augmented aurality, psychogeography, audio interaction design, foklore and the challenges of recording music outdoors. A very pleasant and relaxed session that saw me come away with some new ideas and perspectives.

XETB – Three Spirits (preliminary artwork)

Next, the 19th XETB album has finally found a home and will be released early in 2013, primarily on professionally duplicated cassette. More details on this as they appear!

This frees up a bit of mental space to begin thinking about the sequel to Almias! I hope to be able to find a bit of funding so that the Almias trio can also enlist an actor or two to help us discover a spectral, (dis)embodied narrative within the Yorkshire Landscape.

Church Field by Layla Legard

Folklore Wedding

At the end of October I married Layla, my true love, by the Witch’s Stone in Meanwood Park. This is single standing stone beside Meanwood Beck, perhaps erected in the early 19^th century by Edward Oates (grandfather of Captain Lawrence “I may be some time” Oates). It has become one of the focal points in our relationship, alongside the stone of Cocidius at Alwoodley Crags and, of course, Almscliffe Crag.

The Witch’s Stone, by Layla Legard