TouchRadio 142

"tic-tac-toe" was written for Gilbert Ratcliffe, who in 2017 was a final-year dance student at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire. For this performance, called "You Watching Me?", choreographed for a small group of dancers, Gil wrote: "My research was centred on the physical and mental manifestation of my journey with Tourettes Syndrome. I explored it through the collaborative process between choreographer and dancers to see if we could create a non-narrative, abstract dance work that was able to elicit an emotional, performative response." Gil knew what the broad structure needed to be, and the dancers had ideas about sounds that would resonate well with the subject but there was lots of freedom between those staging posts. I loved how the dancers only needed occassional markers, between which they related to the sounds but werent bound by them. No need for anything as prosaic as counting out beats. Gil's research involved talking to lots of people with TS, and reading through it I got keen on the simple idea of the electrical impulses that run through the body as it moves whether voluntarily or involuntarily. In the end, its all a synaptic dance. I recorded the feet of the dancers as they rehearsed, so that the piece could conjour up unseen dancers around the stage. Elsewhere metal spins against metal, balls bounce to a stop, there is a visit to the sea shore and a recording I made of the old editor of the Guardian being "banged out", in the tradition of old Fleet Street. The painting is courtesy of Gil's mum Melanie an artist and painter who has often worked with dancers.

Buildings, and the spaces and atmospheres that they enclose, are primarily experienced through seeing them and hearing them. Visions of them are the trajectories and alterations of light that travel within them to the observer. Audition of them is via the patterns of reflected and diffracted sound that repeatedly pass the observer as their energy decays and spreads. Just as buildings have a visual signature (what they look like) so they have an aural one. Each is dynamic: changing how a room is lit will change how it looks, making different kinds of noise within it will reveal different aspects of its sound. However, exploration is bounded by the laws of physics and perception and the fixed nature of the buildings themselves. Useful techniques and modes of expression such as feature exaggeration, time manipulation, rapidly changing or impossible perspectives and micro/macro-scoption require augmentation of reality, but enable boundaries to be exceeded. It becomes possible to experience not just what a building is, but how it is in our perception; how, for example, the different elements of its geometry and fabric relate to each other and the individual contributions they make to the whole. The fixed nature of buildings is one of their defining characteristics. They often stand immutable amongst the peoples, their cultures and technologies, that create them and use them. They are perhaps the person made things that change most slowly over time and reach furthest into our present from their past. The National Centre for Early Music is housed within the Medieval church of St Margaret in the Walmgate area of York. Traces of Sound and Light was site-specific fixed-media installation created by this author and the visual artist Annabeth Robinson. Based on data obtained from light detecting and ranging (LIDAR) and acoustic impulse response measurement (AIR) it used technological augmentation of the both the observer and the space to literally enable the audience to see and hear the space which they are within in new ways that would otherwise be impossible. A 3D animation derived from the point cloud obtained from the LIDAR process was delivered to head-mounted smartphones worn by the audience, and audio created solely from the AIR measurements and readings of text fragments inscribed within the space was diffused via multiple loudspeakers.This is binaurally captured (and therefore ideally suited to headphone listening) audio from the version of the installation presented in St Margaret's at the 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio. Image: Annabeth Robinson

This is a composition of field recordings taken at various wind turbine farms over the last year. They are recordings taken as part of a sound project I’m working on which looks at infrastructure; a sonic exploration into the unseen mechanics which underpin our daily lives: Power, transport, sewer systems, communications and supply logistics. The recordings presented here are in a fairly raw state and will be developed and augmented within the wider body of work. However, I think they hold different value in their 'solo' and raw form - and may be of particular interest to listeners of TouchRadio. The modern wind turbine is an awe inspiring machine - gracefully benign from two miles away, yet from within their shadow they assault an image of improbable violence on the senses. Designed to perform modern day alchemy through a screamed slicing of the troposphere, they detune the very skies which hang overhead and broadcast infrasonic resonances into the ground which i was able to record through a geophone from over half a mile away. Within the setting of ‘nature', these machines are the very definition of unnatural; up close, their rotating violations of nature's laws feel viscerally threatening.But then these locations too are, by necessity, raw and unforgiving environments. Bleak moorland at raised altitude or wide unsheltered flatlands; horizon to horizon, exposed, desolate, dystopian. The wind howls across these plains, transforming the totally inert into the wildly volatile at an instant; bracken, heather, gorse, singing fence wires dissecting arbitrary shingle boundaries for mile upon mile. The source material was recorded in multichannel spatial format using various ambisonic and stereo air mics, geophone and contact microphones matrixed to 5 channel surround. Equipment: Sonosax SX R4+ Ambeo / DPA 4060 / MK-416 / Telinga Mk2 JRF contact mics matrixed to 5ch / JRF prototype geophone Thanks to Jez Riley French for the geophone loan, Rudi at Helix Branch and Emily Mary Barnett for her photography/patience.

If the mainstream media (MSM) won't broadcast this, then we will.

Sifting through his archive of live recordings, Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) chose this performance from 2015 (in a very cold church in Bochum, Germany) as a favourite. As with most of his gigs, the concert was improvised, using an analogue tone generator as the main sound source, a radio, a contact mic, and a selection of pedals. Always a hit-and-miss venture, but always exciting (though at times nerve-wracking for the artist). Photo by Constantly Consuming

Whilst on holiday in Sicily Stuart wanted to capture the sound of the local church bells. Choosing to record at 12 noon every day seemed a reasonable way to record more elaborate bell combinations whilst also fitting in other holiday plans with his travelling companion. An edit of ten minutes from each location is included here, with 12 o’clock being positioned in the middle at five minutes to afford some context of the local area. Sicilian dialect has been used to indicate each day. Church names have been used to indicate location rather than street names, and bells from nearby churches can also be heard as the timing on each church is slightly different. Some churches ring twice, and one church not at all. The bird sounds were made by an old man hiding behind the tree that I was recording under. Recorded using a Sound Devices Mix-Pre 6, and a stereo pair of LOM Usi omni-directional mics attached to a coat hanger. Màrtiri – San Francesco di Paola, Palermo Mèrcuri – Cattedrale di Palermo and Parrocchia Ss Maria Assunta Iòviri – Parrochia San Girolamo, Mondello Vènniri – Chiesa di San Domenico, Palermo Sàbatu – Cattedrale di Monreale Dumìnica – Chiesa del Gesù, Palermo

"Between the City and the Forest" collects field recordings made between 2015-2018 in areas around Los Angeles, Mojave, and the Sierra Nevada. The piece features a millipede walking on a tent, many species of birds, treefrogs, electromagnetic and other urban city textures, as well as some websdr recordings. Special thanks to Bill, Laurel, Greg, Russ, and all those I met on the Sound Recording and Analysis Workshop in June 2018.

Estonia has a rich and powerful nature orchestra, and this might be because two thirds of the country is covered with forests and bogs which are often almost untouched. Estonian nature sound is sometimes discrete and quiet, sometimes powerful, but it is always magical. This sound piece features the magnificent performance of the orchestra over a period of 24 hours in the spring. The recording opens with a dawn chorus in the Alam Pedja nature reserve. It then travels to the primaeval forest of Jarvselja and the wetlands south of the Ahja jogi, close to Lake Peipsi and the Russian border. The latter is a boreonemoral, drained peatland and swamp forest area. Chirping birds, croaking frogs, a barking deer and a rumbling thunderstorm make up the choir. The star performers, howling wolves, end this nature symphony just before the sun rises over the forest. Great care has been taken to make the sound piece time and rhythm coherent as well as biogeographically consistent. Man-made noise such as woodworking has been kept as it is, an integral part of the soundscape. The intention is to render the reality as is, not to change it: quiet sounds have remained quiet and might require more concentrated listening on the part of the listener. The music of nature moves slowly. The recorded piece invites the listener to an immersive experience. Take the time to listen through the full length and hopefully be transported. Our thanks go to Robert Oetjen and Triin Libe of the Palupohja nature school, to Andrus Kannel as well as to Mariell Jussi and Rene Valner who have helped make these recordings possible.

This recording was made at the Block Gallery in New Cross on May 27th 2018 to mark the closing of the ‘Maquettes’ exhibition. The full text of the reading is available in issue 3 of Satori magazine. Richard Bevan supplied the recording. The photograph is by Rachel Hollings.

Through the Night was recorded on June 10th 2018 at Glenshee, Scotland during ‘Murmurations’. Mixed with Rob Aitken, with thanks to Chris Watson + Jez Riley French.