sonic sketchbooks

release date - 28 september 2021

This week’s composition is titled ‘To Higher Ground’. I constructed it over the past week, returning to strategies of using spoken word appropriated from diverse sources that I began with in the 1970’s when I’d cassette record voices from broadcast television and shortwave radio to use in cutups for performances, installations and super 8 film soundtracks. The tools have changed but the strategy remains one I continue to explore and experiment with.

The semantic demand of the spoken word activates only for those languages we, as individuals, can comprehend. For those we do not, the rhythms, cadences and inferences of heard disembodied language carry cultural and humanist emotional references that vary depending on our prior interests, exposures, curiosities, capacity for empathy and so on.

In ’To Higher Ground’, fields of sound created with tools like the MakeNoise Morphagene, EMF detectors, and apps such as RadioGarden and Natural Readers, are combined with my field recordings to form aural spaces populated with borrowed de-contextualised words, phrases and statements from various recognisable and anonymous speakers.

Sonic Sketchbooks is an art project of slow listening and poetic intent, offered to our ‘interesting’ times of incoherent abundance, accelerated attentions and generalised anxieties.

This weeks composition is another generative foray into the archive, built from a selection of my field and studio recordings.

The field recordings include water dripping from the gutters of a remote farmhouse outbuilding after a passing storm at 3am; heavy rain drumming the metal skin of my car, pulled up on a bush track; hydrophone recordings of a hill creek rushing with stormwater; and the conversations and song of dozens of birds on bidjigal country, just north-west of sydney, on a warm afternoon, the native avian music thats been sounded there for thousands of millenia, long before any human presence - and which, almost miraculously, can still be experienced there today.

The studio recordings are of ad-hoc sonic-kinetic assemblages of tins, bottles, and boxes with seeds, balls and objects inside, all tied together with rubberbands and fixed to modified turntables - my aleatoric ensembles. And a couple of outputs from various of my small electronic generators…

These diverse sources have been shaped into a slowly evolving exploration of sonic atmospheres and suggestion, wandering the spaces of imaginative provocation that connect writer to reader, artist to spectator, composer to listener…

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

release date: 14 september 2021

I've been collecting more Electromagnetic Frequencies or EMF from the local environment - this time scavenging sounds from various sources in the small apartment I live in.

Every electronic device, source or connection will generate some form of EMF, which remains mostly inaudible to the naked ear though sometimes you might hear a hum or a buzzing. There’s a kind of electrosonic diversity to these found sounds - there’s an anima there, a life-likeness; the EMF flutters, whistles, tones and crackling like the cryptic calls and cries of insects, birds and animals in an environment.

This time I’ve used a different EMF detector, one built by Sorte Muld Instruments, a project of Martin Kofoed a visual artist and illustrator living in Amsterdam. Sorte Muld, meaning perhaps black soil or black mold, is an important Danish archaeological site of an iron age-early viking settlement that was populated for a millenium into the common era.

Significant finds there include hundreds of tiny stamped gold foil squares of diverse figurative symbolism. No-one really knows what the funtion or use-value of these tiny gold squares was - somewhat like my sonic sketchbooks podcast...

This composition is another sonic derivé, drifting the listener across and through curious scene-settings for an audio theatre of the mind, built with fragments of recordings made in the past few days of this third month of a COVID lockdown here in Sydney Australia.

You can find out more about the Sorte Muld EMF detector and explore the podcast series in the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

This weeks episode is a new composition titled ‘a lot of unidentified sounds…’.

I’ve assembled it over the past few days from recordings and generations, mostly new but a few old. It’s another of my sonic constructions or sound sculptures built to occupy, or reside in, time rather than space - but a form of sculpture nonetheless. And a form of drawing also - bringing disparate elements together on the blank field of time by combining strategies of chance and selection, foregrounding, erasure, filtering, positioning and repositioning, to create a singular artwork.

As I’ve mentioned before, I imagine these compositions to be of interest for the listener working in their studio, doing the housework, in the interstitial spaces of travel, out walking or having trouble sleeping.

[It may be presumptuous of me to suggest that these pieces are worth listening to more than once.]

You can find out more about the podcast in the episode guide at sonicskechbooks.net

This week’s episode is a quiet, contemplative piece that arose from re-listening to recordings I made on the 25 May 2017 during a day of wandering in Kanazawa, an important cultural town on the west coast of Honshu Japan, about equidistant from Tokyo and Kyoto.

I went there to visit two museums and a garden - the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art designed by Japanese architects SANAA, the DT Suzuki Museum, and the famous Kenrokuen Garden, its name reflecting the six characteristics of this centuries-in-the-making stroll garden - spaciousness, seclusion, artifice, antiquity, water-courses and panoramas.

The SANAA-designed museum contains a permanent open-roofed interior room-space by James Turrell - an empty space to quietly sit and observe the changing light, air, sound and visitor responses punctuated by the opening and closing of glass sliding doors.

The DT Suzuki Museum celebrates this critical figure in the transmission of Buddhist, particularly Zen, philosophy, thought and practice from the east to the west in the 20th century. Situated at the base of a forested hill, the museum features a contemplation pavilion situated as an architectural island in a large shallow reflection pool. The triple height room is empty but for a square arrangement of cushioned benches where visitors can sit and gaze on the water through open rectangular apertures in the huge walls.

Both these extraordinary spaces are constructed to promote, or allow, a sense of quiet immersion in the ordinary, to quiet the mind and open up the unpredictable offering of every moment to new consideration.

Making field recordings is a form of meditative practice - listening attentively to whatever arises and passes. So this week’s composition explores a strategy of suspending field recordings within a durational musical drone created with grains of the recordings stretched beyond recognition, pulled into a signifying realm of sonic solemnity. Its a kind of homage to Suzuki and Turrell for gifting us their proposals - in thought, place and practice - that quietude is important.

You can find out more at sonicsketchbooks.net

Some time ago I bought a curious device from SOMA the electronic sound laboratory of Ukrainian-born sonic innovator Vlad Kreimer. The device is called Ether and Vlad designed it for hearing the invisible electromagnetic frequencies that surround us but which we don’t consciously sense - we can’t see, feel, touch, taste or hear them.

Ether is a handheld object, a little black box, that contains a magnetic antenna and an integrated electronic antenna. There are two thumb wheels on the side - one for volume, the other for frequency tuning. A pair of metal nubs can be used for direct contact with surfaces. Ether can detect and sonify low-frequency magnetics as well as high frequency radio signals.

This episode of sonic sketchbooks is built entirely from sounds detected by Ether as I wandered about the streets of my local neighbourhood. Many of the sound sources were evident - of particular interest were door entry panels - but many sounds were spatially definitive fields that I could walk in and out of but which had no determinable generative origin.

The composition time-smears and overlays excerpts from an hour long recording I made on a 3km roundtrip walk on the morning of Wednesday 18 August 2021. It’s an unusual sonic space, one we’re seldom exposed to and have been culturally trained to dislike - the noise-sound generated as by-product of our technocentric lifestyles that is usually intentionally filtered out of our communication systems. The noise that gets in the way, feels somewhat dystopian, reminds us of entropy and chaos, or doesn’t stir helpful emotional response in the way that favoured music might.

But spending some time with these strange sounds usually banished into silence, sonifying the invisible energetic presences in which we're constantly bathed, opens interesting possibilities in the sonic imaginary.

You can find out more about SOMA and explore the podcast series in the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

This episode is an unedited recording I made, with the artists permission, of an improvised collaborative soundscape made by participants in a workshop led by japanese artist Tetsuya Umeda who had presented an hour-long solo performance a couple of nights earlier as part of the 2017 Performance Space Liveworks Festival at Carriageworks which is housed in repurposed 19th century locomotive workshops in inner city Eveleigh.

Umeda-san uses simple physics involving heat and harmonics, pressure, gravity, dry ice and everyday objects to create multi-source sonic events which he performatively activates, wandering around amongst diverse objects and devices strewn in a large circle around which the audience gathers.

We watch him set up assemblages that will drip, explode, tumble, or fall at some indeterminable point along the hour-long journey. At the show I attended, the performance was underpinned by reverberant harmonic drones emanating from many heated columns, each made of three empty food tins stuck together sitting over small gas burners. Umeda-san would place the tubes on the burners at different times, and each would take a little while to begin its drone and over time, the various drones combined into strange standing wave patterns tha the could then vary by moving his hand over the column, removing from the heat, adding a little water and so on.

In the Saturday afternoon workshop, with about 20 others, Umeda-san showed us how to construct one of these instruments that produces a single resonant frequency tone, and we all made one each - later, in the same cavernous space in which he had performed, the group created an improvised soundscape using the tone-tubes and other found objects and materials provided by Umeda-san - such as blocks of dry ice - and found in pockets and backpacks.

release date: 10 august 2021 - Australian census day

Well into the second month of another COVID-19 lockdown here in Sydney, with high daily infection rates indicating no end in sight for a while…

This weeks episode presents the soundtracks to a collective series of abstract digital video sequences titled Colourforms that I made in 2017 for a gallery exhibition.

Anyone who has seen my Instagram posts during this lockdown will be familiar with my ‘digital dusk’ series of one minute visual abstracts. The origin of the technical methodology I use to make them might begin with the Colourform series, but the aesthetic was certainly in play a lot earlier, in the 1970s, when I’d draw directly on Super 8 and 16mm celluloid film with overheard projection pens and make 35mm slides using cellophane, packaging and any other translucent materials that could be cutup and glued together on that tiny work area.

Today I construct and film simple kinetic assemblages with my iPhone, bring the scenes into Final Cut Pro and manipulate exposure, saturation, filters, time, and layers blending to explore abstract visual potentials, completely disassociating the filmed scenes from any semblance of real world recognition to place them squarely within the context and historical traditions of abstract art.

The six tracks of this podcast episode were constructed in a similar way, developing abstraction from both the captured vision and its accompanying sound. Each track is introduced by its original title, ably though awkwardly spoken by a digital assistant.

The COVID-19 lockdown in Sydney continues as does my excavation of files from the rhyzomatic strings of long neglected nested folders on an old workhorse iMac.

This weeks episode presents a mix of tracks commissioned in 2014 for automated daily replay in the Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, South Australia. The sounds emanated quietly from inside a small laser-cut timber geodesic dome I designed to house an ipod and stereo speaker set. The intention was to introduce a strange ambience in a relatively confined sonic field within the subdued space of the large open interior.

The MEB is a unique museological space, the last remaining in the world of a type once found throughout the colonies of the 19th century British Empire. They were small museums of botanical science and industry designed to inform settler cultures of the types of productive uses they might make of occupied territories through agriculture - which plant species might thrive in a particular climate to yield timber, fruits, grains, fibres and other of the innumerable uses of plants required for the development of settler economies.

Adelaide’s exemplary museum opened in 1881 and through the 20th century sat like an architectural rip van winkle, asleep , dimly lit, a charming archaic relic. In 2008, then director of the botanic gardens Steve Forbes invited curator and historian Peter Emmett to think about what might be done with the building which was being drawn into a development project that ight turn it into a visitor centre, or worse, a cafe… Peter convinced the authorities of the true value of the museum and proposed to return it to its 1881 original state - mainly because the entire collection was still there, and his research revealed it to be the only one of its kind remaining in the world.

I worked on the interpretation for the opening of the new space in 2009, and later made a soundscape for its interior. The tracks are mostly built from field recordings I made in the gardens over various visits.

release date: 27 july 2021

This weeks episode is made in the fifth consecutive week of a fairly restrictive COVID19 lockdown here in Sydney and I made the program where I live in a small apartment in Redfern, on gadigal country.

Wondering if and when I might ever be able to visit Japan again, I built this new composition with excerpts from field recordings on a retired iMac I have at home; recordings I made in and around Kyoto on visits in 2014 and 2015.

I listen to playlists from my field recordings in my studio while working, letting the recordings play in their entirety, each track usually around 20 minutes. In my podcast compositions, I intuitively sequence, mix, effect and filter excepts from the recordings to create a kind of sonic dérive, a wandering listening through encounters and ambiences entangled by poetic association.

You can find information about the podcast series via the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net - this is episode 30.