Crunch!

Hectic times are upon me this month, with three conference sessions on the horizon in the next few weeks… So, part four of The New Speculative Music  is going to have to wait until mid-March, unless the Muses suddenly take hold of my keyboard.

Angelystor at Hartshead.

What’s coming up? I’ll be at the Six Eight Kafé on the 24th of February talking as part of Birmingham’s Network Music Festival. I’ll be doing two sessions: one with Nigel Morgan on Active Notation, and one on my own about locative media.

The week after I’ll be at the opening of the Uncanny Landscapes conference at Royal Holloway University, doing an artists talk called Music, Magic and Metaxy.

To save a bit of space here, you can read abstracts on my presentations page.

The Angelystor application is coming along nicely in advance of these dates. It needs a bit of polishing up, but writing it has been a very useful exercise. Last week, Layla and I went out to test it at St. Peter’s Church in Hartshead, which itself shares a very similar legend to that of Angelystor.

St. Peter’s Church, Hartshead.

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Auditioning Angelystor

Testing the Angelystor app.

Earlier this week I continued developing the prototype LOAM software by writing the basic code for the Angelystor application. Angelystor is a piece of music based around the folklore of the St. Digain’s church, where on Hallowe’en the voice of the spirit Angelystor may be heard pronouncing the names of those in the parish who will die in the coming year… Angelystor imagines a night, from dusk to dawn, in the Llangernyw churchyard.

The app allows you to relocate a multi-track version of the Angelystor to any location (ideally a churchyard) and to use your environment as a virtual mixer. It should be available to download by the end of the month.

The music itself grew out of couple of rough and ready field-recordings made by Layla, as detailed here. It was produced by myself with some help from Briony Yorke and Layla. You can have a listen to a rough mix of the ‘fixed’, non-locative version below! [Edit: now HERE]

Visionary Magicke: An Elizabethan Gentleman in the Underworld

Over the summer I occupied myself with a number of projects, among them transcribing a 16th century manuscript which details the magical adventures of Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert. Preserved as part of the British Library’s Additional MS. 36674, the two items in question tell of what Humphrey and his young friend John Davis  (- later to be England’s master navigator) got up to in the spring of 1567, during which time Gilbert, serving in the army during the brutal Tudor conquest of Ireland, had been dispatched to England.

Add. 36674, ff. 47v – 48r.