sonic sketchbooks

Like anyone who’s worked with analogue and digital sound over a long period of time, I’ve built up a huge library of recordings across a range of categories from field recordings to unique self-built instruments, samples made by sounding found and everyday objects, digital manipulations of these samples and of course various forms of sound synthesis, lately with modular synthesisers and some of the many innovative electronic devices people are inventing, small-scale making and putting out into the world.

When working on my drawing, writing or instrument-building projects I like to load up the imac with a fairly randomly selected collection of recordings opened in the quicktime player, setting them all to loop and letting the collection of files play together for long periods of time.

Of course, the files are all of wildly varying sonic textures and durations, so the loops cross over each other with assured indeterminacy. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it but I do very much enjoy the wild interplay of sounds, the cinematic suggestiveness and surprising correspondences that arise and dissipate through this simple strategy. The strategy might be considered a generator of only a careless flow of dissonance but, for me and perhaps for you too, I definitely experience a particular captivation bringing a previously unknown sonic ecology to life.

For this weeks episode, I recorded three of these chance driven aural encounters directly out of the imac line-out and did no further processing to the outcomes. Unlike my usual practice where I simply leave the files to play (because I’m doing something else), for these recordings I did make occasional live compositional interventions by way of stops and starts, and fades in and out to provide some textural and temporal modulation, but given there were eleven or more files all playing simultaneously, even these interventions have a strong stochastic sense.

Each of the three tracks in this episode is approximately 20 minutes duration, so the episode is longer than usual - just in case you’re interested to experiment with experimental sound work as a background to your own studio investigations…

release date: 30 november 2021

Forced Audience, The Dialectic Process of Change, Another Transport to Sleep, Lament of the LionKillers, Today the World, Pace of Erosion… titles of cassette recorded sound works I made in the 1970s and 80s.

This episode is an ethereal visitation from that time, airing a small selection of sonic explorations I made then using cassette tape recorders, working alone in share-house bedrooms and with collaborators in lounge rooms, practice rooms, galleries, abandoned buildings and the street.

We begin with a recording made in 1981 with artist John Nixon, after-hours in Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. John was the new director, up from Melbourne where he’d established his legendary Art Projects gallery. He invited me to work as a gallery assistant, as technical assistant for his various film, tape and photography projects, and as one of many collaborators in his utopian AntiMusic project.

The track is titled ‘Across a Distance’. John sings his lyrics adapted from Russian Futurist poetry, I play the saxophone and other instruments are by John and percussionist Clare Mackenna.

For these night sessions, John would bring prepared cassette tapes he’d recorded sounds onto, we’d set them playing, then play live along with the playback, recording the maelstrom of sound with another cassette recorder, live in one take.

We named our group The Black Spots and John published this track in his AntiMusic Sampler on London-based Bill Furlonger’s Audio Arts series of cassette releases. They can be listened to online at the Tate London’s website.

Following this are excerpts from my one-off cassette tape sound works. Someone I spent time exploring sound with was Brisbane digital media wiz Adam Wolter. We started using cassette recording while in high school together in the mid-70s - track two is a sample of this youthful anarchy. Having studied computer programming at the University of Queensland he became adept at coaxing unusual creative possibilities from Amiga computers. Various tracks here include samples of Adam’s early computer music experiments overlaid with my early play with text-to-speech synthesis.

Another longtime collaborator heard on various tracks is Brisbane artist Eugene Carchesio, a fellow sonic explorer who continues to make and release beautifully enigmatic offerings of minimal means.

There is plenty to say about each of these tracks but it’s perhaps better to offer them up without too much prefiguring, other than to note, on re-listening to the recordings after many decades it strikes me that the kinds of sounds I found of interest then remain much the same 40 years on, as listeners to this podcast may also recognise…

This week, in my teaching at the National Art School, I’m lecturing and assigning a project on drawing and the palimpsest.

In 1845, English writer Thomas De Quincey wondered

“What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished…

… I mention a case communicated to me by a lady… still living, though now of unusually great age; and I may mention that amongst her faults never was numbered any levity of principle, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity…

… She had completed her ninth year, when, playing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; but not until she had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can have looked that had permission to return.

At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her, phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eyeballs; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of her past life, lived again, arraying themselves not in succession, but as parts of a coexistence.

…Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, … poured celestial vision upon her brain, so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.

A pall, deep as oblivion, had been thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet suddenly, at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent up from the brain, the pall draws up, and the whole depths of the theatre are exposed.”

paraphrased from “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain” Thomas De Quincey 1845

This week’s episode continues my ongoing investigations of the sonic potentials of the MakeNoise Morphagene modular synthesis module, previously featured in episodes 41 and 44.

This new composition incorporates Morphagene-ic manipulations of original captured sounds made with some of my one-off studio-built sound art instruments, occasionally punctuated with unprocessed field recordings made around inner city Sydney.

I’m interested in exploring the suggestive spaces and ways in which perceptual processing of unfamiliar sonic information - sounds for which its difficult to attach a known source, such as the frequently unpredictable sonic artifice generated by the Morphagene - is challenged or disrupted when familiar real world sounds in the form of field recordings bubble through their cryptic sonic fabric.

You can explore the podcast series in the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

During the most recent 3-month COVID lockdown here in Sydney Australia, to maintain creative engagement I did a small project for a while titled 'digital dusk', a series of daily one minute abstract digital video works posted to my Instagram account. Each video was made by setting up a kinetic event that I videoed with my iphone and used as source material for extreme filter manipulation in final cut pro.

Sounds were generated from combinations of my micro-electronics digital sound gear including the Koma FieldKit FX, a LittleBits Korg synthesiser kit, the Bastl Kastle and a few portable speakers, often with sound-generating attachments, placed in boxes and other containers to weird their sound output. Sounds were captured live in the space, usually the bedroom.

After playing around with both sound and vision, the day’s outputs were paired, in a Cageian fashion, and posted. The whole process was intended to be relatively immediate and generative - each day’s output leading to progressive experiments the following day.

Of course, much more media was generated than was used. This podcast revisits a selection of the digital dusk source audio - repurposed, re-effected, layered and sequenced to create this new composition put together on a rainy Sunday.

Of late I’ve been getting to know the MakeNoise Morphagene modular synthesis device. The User Manual describes it as being “informed by the worlds of Musique Concrete and Microsound”, “a set of tools for creative synthesis” “ for the creation of new musical form and content, previously unimagined.”

It enables extreme manipulation of recorded sound using a syncretic paradigm of delimited analogue tape splicing exaggerated by the granular control capabilities of digital software. That is, infinitely variable fragmentation and reassembly of sonic units discretised down to improbable fractions of seconds duration, organised and disorganised in complex systems activated by tiny variations in voltage control signals. Unscripted, possibly unscriptable combinations and sequences of sonic fragments drifting into basins of attraction, pattern teasing and spilling into unpredictably chaotic cascades.

As source material for this most aleatoric composition, I prepared a small set of recordings using five empty aluminium beer cans. I teased a variety of sounds from them on the kitchen bench, beginning with the objects intact and gradually reducing them by stages to tiny pieces, coaxing sounds from each stage of their disintegration by tapping, dropping, rolling, shaking, etc.

Once ingested into the Morphagenes random access memory, combinations of cables carrying tiny voltage variations were experimented with to derive the dereeve you’re about to hear.

The resulting composition paradoxically synthesises interruption as flow, using fragment as method to simultaneously generate and disrupt an unusual listening experience - its a kind of aural synechdoche or fractal in which any part effectively represents the whole.

Back in the 20th century, French essayist and semiotician Roland Barthes explored and expounded the fragment as technique, content and political strategy.

For Barthes, fragments held the potential to manifest escape from the tyranny of mundane meaning imposed by so-called ‘common sense’ and received wisdom. He characterised his writing, and intellectual works as ‘a circle of fragments’.

A quote from 1977 exemplifies : “To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what?”

With three companions I travelled to Japan in May 2018. One of the reasons for this trip was to finally visit Hiroshima, to be present and pay my respects at the site of one of the principal atrocities of the 20th century.

This episode of Sonic Sketchbooks comprises excerpts from recordings I made over the three days we spent staying on the rural outskirts of the city, journeying to visit Hiroshima’s Museum of Contemporary Art, A-Bomb Museum, Peace Park and the skeletal Genbaku Dome remains that, along with the mushroom cloud, have become the enduring symbols of that awful moment at 8:15am on the 6th of August 1945 when over 70,000 Japanese people were instantly extinguished from life on earth and as many again were terribly wounded and traumatised.

Of course, 70 years on from that moment, the Hiroshima we visited was like any other well-known Japanese city - bustling, teeming with tourists, brimming with a peculiar mixture of greenery and concrete, peppered with temples and shrines, little restaurants and bars, department stores, the unique scents and sounds of Japanese daily life in the air. It’s difficult to access any sense of that time-distant horror - which is why the museum, the peace park and the memorial exist - to enshrine and ensure remembrance. Everywhere around the city are plaques and information panels with bi-lingual texts and archival photos - many taken by US Army personnel - explaining the narratives of places transformed by war and post-war change.

A surprising encounter was with trees that survived the bomb blast and live on to shade inner city streets today. Each is considered a living treasure - a green legacy - known as the Hibakujumoku - one of which is an eastern Australian gum tree - Eucalyptus melliodora or yellowbox - that survived in the grounds of the completely destroyed 16th century Hiroshima Castle.

This sound wander begins and ends with birdcall around the air-b&b we stayed in, a farm house surrounded by rice paddies about to be planted out. Our hosts were a lively elderly couple who greeted us with hibachi grill, beer and sake. Just before leaving two days later Kazuhiro-san drove us up to his local shinto shrine atop the adjacent forested hill, to instruct us in the etiquette of shrine visiting.

We took a local train into Hiroshima - you’ll hear a Shinkansen bullet train shoot through the station at well in excess of 200km per hour - it really is blink and you miss it! - and spent the day walking from site to site contemplating the dreadful recurrent reality of destructive warfare, the human ability for renewal, and the enduring hope and work for peace despite and because of the persistent pernicious presence of military madness.

The bell you will hear is the Peace Bell funded by a survivor’s group and forged in 1964. Installed in a small domed concrete structure within the Peace Park it can be sounded by anyone to signal their desire for peace. A moat surrounding the structure is planted with the progeny of 2000 year old lotus seeds germinated by Japanese scientist Professor Ichiro Oga. They reference that survivors wrapped their savagely blistered burnt bodies with lotus leaves in attempt to alleviate their pain.

This weeks offering is an exploration of the sonic drone. Many musicians of many cultures and times have explored and exploited the mesmeric nature of persistent sonic presence to evoke saintly states of grace and excite stoner states of mind.

Here, rather than working with instruments, I’ve repurposed three brief field recordings -

a vintage Roland pen plotter I recorded in Professor Jon McCormacks office at Monash University in 2012 - Jon had written software to control the device to reproduce drawings in his Niche Constructions generative art series;

- the Man O’War Steps floating pontoon near the Sydney Opera House, a series of recordings that have been used in different ways in the two previous sonic sketchbooks episodes;

- a new recording I made a few days ago during wet weather with two different contact mics attached to a metal brace securing a metal downpipe draining rainwater from the galvanised iron roof of an early 20th-century electricity substation building directly adjacent to the late 20th-century residential apartment building where I live in Redfern, Australia, on Gadigal country.

I slowed the pen plotter recording to different percentage values - 20, 30, 40, 50 etc - and overlaid them to build the bed drone, the longitudinal warp of this composition. Weft sounds drawing into and through the warp, are stochastic drips and flows of rainwater in the downpipe 'interpreted' via my MakeNoise Morphagene and the creaking and grinding of the pontoon moving in response to other watery energy transfers.

These three elements are combined, with little intervention, to perform a slow aleatoric drift and shift in homage to the drone that I dedicate to the extraordinary avant-garde works of French composer Eliane Radigue.

eliane radigue interview with composer paul shutze 2011

https://www.frieze.com/article/surround-sound

release date: 12 october 2021

F

requent or perhaps even occasional listeners will by now be familiar with my sonic interests - unusual combinations of slow, strange and stochastic sounds.

T

his weeks episode presents a series of sketches made with the small Eurorack modular synthesiser I’ve put together and have been experimenting with over the past few months.
The system is intentionally oriented to manipulation of files from my samples library - recordings of the art instruments I make, found sonic generators such as the floating pontoon from episode 40 and sonic events performed for the recorder made with repurposed found objects. 

Modular systems are attractive to me for their generative, unpredictable and exploratory qualities combining control and chaos, order and randomness.


The core of my tiny system is a MakeNoise Morphagene which is fed multiple Control Voltage signals from a chain beginning with a Bastl LFO generator feeding into a Mutable Instruments Branches then a TipTop Audio MISO. The series provides order from the LFO, randomised CV pathing through Branches, fine-grain signal control at MISO and extremely variable CV and manual audio sample manipulation at the Morphagene.



Working with this system is pure experimentation - each module has multiple variable controls, the tiniest twiddle of any dial can dramatically alter the sonic endpoint and it can be next to impossible to recover a state of interest once even a couple of dials have been tweaked, buttons pushed or cables re-patched.

I like this - it keeps me creatively in the moment of making with all its pleasures, frustrations, intrigue and addictive hold. And like any instrument, it requires hours of attentive engagement to develop any useful level of skill or sense of knowing.

release date: 05 october 2021

This weeks episode is titled ‘Below’.

I’ve always been captivated by the eery-strange chaotic sounds made by floating pontoons moving in response to watery energies.

In mid-winter this year, I went down to a favourite pontoon that floats alongside the Sydney Opera House at a place named the Man O’War Steps. From the early 1800s, this convict-constructed sandstone infrastructure project provided a vital access point between sea and land for the British colonisers - after months of ocean going travel on wooden sailing ships, naval men and female convicts alike here put their feet on the earth again, to walk onto and occupy this land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.

At this boundary between water and earth, floating pontoons offer a sonic index of energies natural, artificial and historical. The everywhere apparent flows of change, the global energy of waves, the planetary energy of tides, the surface displacement of passing ferries, ships and boats, the arrival and departure of water taxis - all push, tug and displace the pontoon to sing its mournful song of screeches, wails, thuds and splashes.

I went to the Man O’War pontoon with a contact microphone to attach to the structure and a hydrophone to listen underwater. After an hour immersed under headphones listening to the aching song of the pontoon, I wandered into the adjacent botanic gardens where I encountered families fascinated by huge eels and nesting cormorants of a large pond.

So many connections…