sonic sketchbooks

When I finish creating one episode, I have no idea what the next episode will be. Like many artists who’ve been working for decades, I’m confident an idea for the next project will arise through being open to encounters in the world, its influences, inspirations and intrigues. This is a known unknown.

Last week, during a lunch break, with rain still falling after weeks of deluge,
I watched an hour-long documentary about Japanese-Americans who had been locked up in internment camps in the US during the 2nd World War. The focus of the program was selected creatives who had thrived after the war despite this experience of racist displacement and deprivation.

Among them, inspiring artist Ruth Asawa was profiled and a phrase she spoke proved the spark to begin work on my next podcast - this one. She said “The unknown is really the thing that frees you into the universe.” That is, the unknown unknown.

And so I turned my attentions to thinking again about this epistemological bedrock - the unknown - and considered that listener’s to my intentionally unusual podcast anticipate encounter with ‘the unknown’ each time they listen. The unfolding composition rolls forward on a threshold of unknowing, and it must be a form of pleasure experienced there at this boundary, the skin between inner and outer, known and unknown, that energises this anticipation, and renders it amenable to return.

We begin this new composition ‘the unknown is the thing…’ sitting on a railway platform of the Uji terminus, a town south of Kyoto, Japan waiting for the stationary train to open its doors and accept passengers. It was late afternoon of the 29th of October 2014. I was recording, waiting quietly with friends Ross Gibson and Kathryn Bird who’d invited me to join them on one of their annual pilgrimages to Kyoto - an invitation for which I will always be grateful because as frequent listeners will know, it inspired me to visit Japan a few more times since.

Leaving the Uji terminus, the composition wanders off into the usual unusual territories, textures and timbres of aural palimpsest shaped by intuition and practice, knowing without knowing, this time punctuated with fragmented utterances of Ruth Asawa plucked from undercurrents of the digital ectoplasm.

release date: 29 march 2022

This episode comprises an unedited 50 minute recording I made visiting two of the six venues of the 23rd Biennale of Sydney on Monday 21st of March 2022. Developed by Colombian curator and artistic director Jose Roca, and a curatorium of art workers from several Sydney establishment art institutions, the Biennale is titled ‘rivus’ and explores varying relationships between humans and water. There’s much to read on the biennale website - biennaleofsydney.art - and an exquisite accompanying book ‘rivus: a glossary of water’ published to expand upon and carry forward the conversations, enquiries and arguments proposed across this ambitious, inspiring contemporary art project.

The two venues heard in the recording are The Cutaway at Barangaroo, a cultural space like an enormous sandstone cave opened in 2015, created though excavation for the larger surrounding reclamation development, and Pier 2/3, one of a series of distinctive timber maritime cargo sheds built circa 1920, each is like a horizontal skyscraper - only 2 storeys high but about 175 meters long.

Each venue presents works by many artists together in very large architecturally distinctive open spaces using a variety of materials, methods and media including sonic generations both acoustic and electronically amplified. This aural agglomeration effect creates a unique sonic signature in each space, as the happenstance intermingling of mostly looping sound sources of varying durations performs a perpetually variant yet essentially stable atmospheric affect that cannot help but contribute to visitors experiences of all the artworks.

This recording begins in the Cutaway where I walk around the space as various works take my attention. Exiting the cutaway I take a lift to the top of the headland park and walk through back streets down to the waterfront again and eventually into the second venue, Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay for another perambulation amongst artworks before exiting again into the everyday activity of inner city Sydney, on Gadigal country of the Eora Nation.

Please visit the Biennale website biennaleofsydney.art for detailed information about the exhibition, its many artists, events and propositions. And you can find out more about the podcast at the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

This episode presents a new composition featuring pieces I’ve been making with an app called Borderlands Granular that I’ve had on successive iPads for the past couple of years. It is by far one of the best experimental sound software tools I’ve used - which may be due to the authors’ acknowledgement of being inspired directly by the works and writings of John Cage, Brian Eno and computer music pioneer Max Mathews.

Borderlands originated as a class project at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 2011. Chris Carlson and Ge Wang co-authored a paper describing a desktop computer version of the software in 2012 and Carlson released the iPad version in 2013 with a significant upgrade in 2020.

The software allows for direct live recording ie sampling of sounds which can either be captured for storage and use in the system, or the iPad mics can be left open for live processing.

Multiple captured sounds can then be loaded and manipulated using sophisticated granular synthesis anda wide variety of parametric controls delivered via a neatly designed and highly intuitive interface. See borderlands-granular.com for more information or to purchase the app via the iOS app store.

For this episode, I worked over a few days recording samples of sounds made with objects in the apartment, then used these samples to generate a series of 5 to 10 minute borderlands outputs. A few of these are used in the composition interacting with field recordings I made in Japan in 2017.

The composition commences with a sonic catalogue of the sampled sounds, followed by the series of sketches combining borderlands outputs with the field recordings.

There are links to the borderlands website and you can find out more about the fortnightly sonic sketchbooks podcast at the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

A couple of episodes back I mentioned the writing of John Berger, how I’d been re-reading a large volume of his selected writings. That re-reading prompted me to search my bookshelves for another of his many books. This one, published in hardback in 2011 by Pantheon Books, New York, is titled “Bento’s Sketchbook: How does the impulse to draw something begin?”

It's a thoughtfully produced 160 pages of musings, anecdotes and philosophical enquiry about the nature of art and includes numerous reproductions of Berger’s characteristic exploratory, evocative drawings, punctuated with quotes from 17th century Dutch philosopher, writer, outcast and lens-grinder Benedict Spinoza - the Bento of the title. The book is episodic, diaristic, provocative, inspiring…

At home alone on a rainy morning, I decided to read a few pages out loud. The book fell open to a story John Berger narrates about a chance encounter arising from his everyday life as a senior citizen living in Paris in 2010 (he was born in 1926).

Among other things, it’s an illustration of how art can work - before, beyond and outside of commerce, fame, spectacle or ‘isms - to create meaning in life, to connect people.

As I read the story out loud, I was surprised by the strong affect his writing conjured in me, and as I’d read the story before it had that air of vague familiarity that allows one to better appreciate the craft of the writer, an almost haptic appreciation of the essay’s structure.

For me, this short piece is emblematic not only of of Berger’s style and brilliance as a lifelong writer but of - as I imagine it - his emotional being, his inner crucible of empathy, insight, anger at injustice and his complete inhabitance of life.

So, this episode is simply my reading of those few pages on another rainy day here in Redfern Sydney, on Gadigal country.

This episode is a new exploratory composition titled “And I wondered…” .

It continues my investigations of immaterial time sculpture through the hand-building of sonic apertures and trajectories pieced together from meticulous manipulations of recordings of analogue sound I capture from everyday experiences and activities including walking, drawing, sonifying objects, accidental encounters and intentional field recording.

The piece is a slow meander, a trackless wandering across non-existent territories and amongst dimensionless towers and tunnels of inference, suggestion, confounding affect…

There is no pocket map or explanatory text to guide you - you’re essentially on your own with this artwork, this temporary theatre of strange sonic presentations.

I hope you find the journey of interest, worth your time…

release date: 01 February 2022

This episode is built from recordings I made last week while on a brief working sojourn about 500km south of Sydney where I live. I drove to a farm owned by an old friend, a practicing architect who now also farms cattle and is regenerating bushland on expansive acreage quite close to the Pacific Ocean.

I went there to visit and provide labour to help with some of the endless tasks always requiring attention on a farm. Besides some fencing installation and maintenance, the main work, undertaken over six days, was removal of an invasive vine species ipoemoea indica - that had, over a period of a couple of covid years, completely covered the canopies of about 20 recently established native trees. More is explained in the episode which comprises two distinct parts and a coda:

The first third is an audio verité reportage narrated to my recorder while I worked on the project on the last day; the second movement is a construction of manipulated sounds recorded during my stay - this includes rhythms and melodics derived from the sonic productions of various creatures - cicadas, frogs, birds, cattle -, natural forces of wind and water, and machinery and soundings of objects found around the farm. The piece concludes with a few uninterrupted, unprocessed moments of field recording of the ambience of a still, late evening - most of the time I was there was dominated by strong north-easterly winds…

The days followed a distinct rhythm - early breakfast followed by a few hours of intensive work until lunchtime, then some reading and a sleep, another few hours of afternoon work until dusk, dinner together, more reading and sleep. I took a great block of a book of selected essays by the inspiring and prolific English writer John Berger who knew farm labour well, having moved to rural France in 1972 - when he won the booker prize he gave half the prize money to the American Black Panthers and funded his move from metropolitan london to country france with the rest. He lived, wrote, familied and farmed there until his death at 90 years of age in 2017. He chose to live this way because he recognised rural life as a space of greater opportunity for personal creativity, thought, existential development and as generative - as opposed to predominantly consumerist - living. He has been described as not a modernity-adverse ruralist but a rural futurist.

Here’s a brief quote from a 1983 John Berger essay titled ‘The Production of the World’

“When Vincent painted a small pear tree in flower, the act of the sap rising, of the bud forming, the bud breaking, the flower forming, the styles thrusting out, the stigmas becoming sticky, these acts were present for him in the act of painting. When he painted a road, the road-makers were there in his imagination. When he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Wherever he looked he saw the labour of existence…”

Somewhere underneath, above or beyond language lives music -

and somewhere beyond that beyond lives sonic sketchbooks…

In developing this first episode of 2022 I began with a structuralist approach, chaining together a sequence of two minute excerpts lifted from recordings I’ve made over the past few weeks, including filed recordings. microphonic experiments and my ongoing sometimes frustrating, sometimes beguiling explorations of modular synthesis.

And that initial sequence of excerpts asked for additions, extractions, stretches and folds, stitches and holds, to eventually bring this composition out of nothingness to your ears, dear listener.

Vaguely, lately, I’ve been notioning about sonic ecomimicry - trying to develop, determine, recognise or discover synthetic sound fields that feel like aspects of acoustic sonic experience when out in a forest, by a river or hill creek, sitting amongst heath shrubs or any other place or context where some remnant of pre-industrial, pre-capital, pre-digital entangled environment persists… listening to insects, birds, rainfall, wind, distant wave wash - immersed in audio randomness, being in the fluid ever-mutable, frequently acousmatic moment.

I like to think this is not a romantic or nostalgic pursuit - I simply have always enjoyed being away from the noise of other humans, amongst the chatter and action of other sentient beings going about their existences, because I find that interesting, always have and being as old as I am now, expect I always will - why fight it?

Of course, stochastic sound isn’t at all limited to the diminishing ‘natural world’ - everything that exists - and everything that doesn’t yet or any longer - is in various ways natural - so I do also enjoy and field record the sounds of a building under construction, people milling about in a museum foyer, water dripping from downpipes…

Which bubbles up the enquiry of what it is that’s so captivating about the stochastic production of sound - is it evolutionary attention, the oscillation between hearing and listening to predict, identify, locate, pursue or flee - probably something of that but I expect this fascination is also quite personal and culturally inflected.

I have heard it said that we can close our eyes, but we can’t close our ears. Maybe we don’t need to close our ears because that is, in fact, our default audio-sensory mode. Hearing happens, but listening is opening the mind doors to be attentive, to change the audio-sensory mode from passive - a kind of continuous subconscious scanning - to tune into clear attention, to do the active present work of making meaning from the noise.

One of the popular cultural figures amplified in the 20th century was the songwriter and the singer songwriter - shapers of music and words into affect. I’m more of a sound writer, an artist enacting irrational enquiry via a kind of free association, drawing with sound, taking time, shaping time, offering ponderable propositions of slippery bewilderment.

release date: 28 december 2021


This is the final episode of the Sonic Sketchbooks podcast for 2021. There will be an indeterminate hiatus before starting up again. If you stay subscribed, the next episode should appear for you sometime in February 2022.

For this past year of 2021, I’ve been getting together with two friends and artist colleagues - Michael Thomas Hill and Ross Rudesch Harley - to make sounds with our various synthesisers, music softwares, mics and a couple of ‘normal’ instruments. In the tradition of such things, much time was spent coming up with a collective name - together we are CHORDATA. This episode is the debut airing of a few of the Chordata sonic constructions.

At the beginning of the year, here in Sydney Australia - Gadigal land of the Eora nation - we’d get together weekly in Ross’s home studio to wrestle with multiple devices, too many cables and adaptors, an antiquated mix desk, analogue/digital signal translations, over-complicated softwares and our differing musical preferences, to create freeform soundscapes that perhaps only a parent could love. Gradually each of us succumbed to the allure of modular synthesis, buying into different devices and systems that suit our varying temperaments and sonic preferences.

During the three-month-plus mid-year COVID-19 stay-at-home lockdown we devised a methodology to continue the investigative pleasures of our weekly sonic get togethers, without actually getting together.

Using a shared online folder, each of us prepared bed tracks of four minutes duration and nominated one of the other three to add a second layer which would be forwarded to the third Chordata member for addition of a final layer. Along with the time limit, another rule was titles of a single four letter word.

Over he lockdown, we generated over 40 of these sound sketches from which I’ve selected just five for this episode - kelp, musk, poly, board, and tint - preceded by an earlier live recording we titled ’No.1 in Norway’.

release date: 21 december 2021

A few months ago, a generous colleague and friend gifted me an unusual contemporary musical instrument, the LYRA 8 Organismic Synthesiser conceived and realised by Russian sound artist and visionary electronics engineer Vlad Kreimer.

The Lyra and its family of other wonderfully eccentric instruments is manufactured by Vlad’s company SOMA Synths. It’s a very idiosyncratic synthesiser with a slippery inner life of its own, a kind of electronic wilfulness.

Intermingling with a few of my field recordings, this week’s episode includes spans of sound arising from my first attempts to communicate with the SOMA deus ex machina…

Some odd things happen when out field recording - it’s not always a bucolic past time. A few months ago, visiting my bush property, an off-grid conservation area and haven for native flora and fauna species, I was making an early evening recording as I often do, when I was suddenly confronted with a frightening encounter.

My handheld recorder was still running and the documentation of that event is presented here, as part of a new composition weaving field recording verité with the creative artifice of synthesiser explorations and manipulations of analogue kinetic constructions, to conjure a space for the listener’s imagination, to wander in for a while as we begin to draw the curtains on the year that was 2021.

There’s a link to the SOMA instruments website and you can find out more about the podcast via the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

release date: 14 december2021

I’ve been occasionally working with an interesting piece of software called SoundPlant designed and maintained by Marcel Blum, self-described as “a coder, consultant, musician, and vinyl archaeologist based in New York”.

I like to use softwares designed by fellow artists and Soundplant is particularly useful as it facilitates mapping of sound files to a computer keyboard, and playing of the files by simply clicking keys. Files can be looped, faded, edited and mildly altered with in-built digital effects. Each combination of files is called a Keymap. I’ve used it in performance contexts but more often as a convenient method of exploring live sound combinations in the studio.

For this weeks episode, I loaded up a couple of older keymaps and recorded live outputs to my trusty Tascam digital audio recorder, then remixed them into a new composition using the strategies that sonic sketchbooks listener will by now be familiar with - a combination of chance encounters between sounds and selective intervention for compositional texture, modulation and effect.

A couple of different sound types are utilised: fragments of the voices of Myles North and Jennifer Horne, pioneering bio-acousticians based in Africa who made some of the first systematic audio recordings of African birdlife in the mid-20th century; and an ongoing project titled ‘A Spatial Pleximetry’ in which I record the sound of a single percussive strike on containers collected from everyday life - bottles, boxes, packaging - to build a library of brief sonic events for use in installations and performances.

Various manipulations and technological pathing through devices like the MakeNoise Morphagene were used to prepare the suite of tracks for the production of this episode. It’s a bit of a hybrid, a conglomerate or amalgam, drawn across different tangents of my interests in things sonic…