sonic sketchbooks

I constructed this weeks episode during the third week of a stay-at-home, shelter-in-place COVID-19 lockdown on gadigal land, in sydney australia where I live, make and work.

Without access to my studio and the majority of my archived sound library, I’ve structured this episode from field recordings I have on a home iMac, recordings made at the rural artist-in-residence facility at Bundanon on the central south coast of New South Wales.

The spine of the piece, a loud fluttering, is a time-stretched recording of hundreds of flies and other insects swarming on a recently dead wombat. Out bushwalking in pathless forest, I heard the loud sonic epicentre of insects advantaging the carcass long before I could see it.

I set up my recorder to capture a 20 minute document of the event. That recording has been slowed to 10 times the original length, to make strange and hear anew that encounter. Low musical and wailing sounds are slowed forest birds, a crystalline drone slowed cicadas and wind.

This bed track is interwoven with recordings of my walking through different environments at Bundanon - domestic, rural agricultural and remnant bushland - and of fire, water, wind and small sonic events made with found objects.

The intention is to create a strangely evocative soundscape, something to listen to and wonder about while drawing, napping or in other ways spending time in lockdown…

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

This sonic offering is built from recordings made with the Apple iOS app RodeRec from the Australian audio tech company Rode, makers of many excellent microphone types and other audio production gear.

I started using the RodeRec app soon after it was released in 2013, loaded onto an iphone 4, and have always carried and used it on my iphones ever since.

It’s promoted as a ‘field recording’ app and that’s how I’ve used it, to capture recordings of moments of acoustic interest encountered while out in the world. As we tend to carry our phones with us everywhere, the app has been a useful way to hold onto sounds when without my recorders and mics - which is, of course, much of the time. I tend to make shorter captures with the app - though not always - and the ubiquity of mobile phone presence out in the world means that no-one pays a 2nd glance to someone standing looking at their handheld gadget and wearing headphones.

My assumption is that their assumption is I’m listening to music rather than recording a fellow throwing bottles into the back of truck or the sound of travelling on public transport.

So, this composition is comprised only of sounds captured using my iphone and RodeRec, and here there is no time smearing or much in the way of filters or effects, just some layering to create textural and narrative interest…

This episode arose from finding a folder of recordings during a recent lockdown cleanup, forgotten in a digital folder on an old hard drive.

Labelled ‘BINAURAL EXPERIMENTS’ it’s a suite of recordings I made mostly at my bush hut, but some in my inner-city studio and some in the streets of Sydney.

They were made with a pair of binaural microphones that are worn in the ears of the recordist, to help recreate in playback under headphones a strong sensation of aural presence and spatial location of sound sources.

The effect can be quite uncanny, especially when listening back to sounds in the same space they were originally recorded.

For this episode I’ve composed a half-hour sonic wander amongst a selection of files from that folder of experiments. I think about this as a form of abstract art, sculpting with sound and time to create and explore interesting textures, spaces, correspondences, suggestions, the unusual, the not easily categorised work with sound outside the normative silos of music, audio books or sound effects.

The piece is definitely best experienced listening with over-ear headphones…

This episode focuses on an acoustic sculptural object I devised and built in 2014.

It’s a cryptic flattened cylinder that rests on a low stool. A pair of identical stools face each other across the object. Gallery visitors are invited to sit, in pairs, to hold and move the object in their hands.

Sounds are generated within the object - rolling, bumping and random sequences of resonant metallic tones. The object is an instrument producing a musicality of uncertainty.

The mechanism is hidden within, prompting investigation by peering into slots around its perimeter. Like looking into a microscope there’s a scale transition from the space of the room to the shadowy micro-architectural world within, and a simple revelation of the sonic mechanism. Three table tennis balls roll freely around striking any of the dozens of individual steel tines mounted on hardwood blocks inside. 


The object’s form is intentionally reminiscent of the zoetrope, a 19th century pre-cinema optical device for creating animated visual effects. But rather than animation of vision, this object animates sound, relationships, association and memory.

I built the cryptic lamellaphone as an homage to the 19th century English ‘natural philosopher’ Robert Brown (1773-1858). In 1827, he observed a captivating phenomenon through his microscope which he carefully described but could not adequately explain. It was the apparently animated - that is, life driven - motion of pollen grains in water. He published a paper - A Breif Account of Microscopical Observations made in the months of June, July and August 1827 on the particles contained in the pollen of plants and on the general existence of active molecules in organic and inorganic bodies.”

Decades later in the early twentieth century, Australian physicist William Sutherland, Polish scientist Marian Smoluchowski and Albert Einstein independently theorised what Brown had seen - the random motion of minute particles in suspension - as evidence of molecular activity, informed by the rapidly developing new ideas in physics about ‘the atom’. On the movement of small particles suspended in a stationary liquid demanded by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat. The phenomenon is now known as Brownian motion.

So this episode comprises direct and manipulated recordings - made with different microphone types - of my ‘cryptic lamellaphone’ singing songs for Robert Brown.

release date: 22 June 2021

This episode presents interpretations of sound works I developed for participatory performances in the PLATFORM series staged at Articulate project space in Sydney’s inner-western suburb of Leichhardt.

PLATFORM is a project coordinated by Tess de Quincey and curated by Tess and collaborators including Linda Luke, Marcus Whale, Martin del Amo, Eugene Ward and others.

It is a salon afternoon of informal performance by artists from different disciplines including dance, theatre, visual art, ceramics, performance, sound art, and music. The pieces are carefully curated to flow together, occupying every available space within the three level gallery building, its back lane, surrounding streets and nearby urban infrastructure.

At Tess’s invitation I’ve created performances and performance scores for Platform in which whoever of the other artists volunteer become the largely unrehearsed players in a sonic event involving soundings of post-consumer waste - bottles, boxes, tins, containers - from which sound is teased using breath, hand-made mallets, motions and gravity.

The scores involve a simple instruction that all performers enact for a loosely predetermined period of time. For example, while walking slowly around the space, hold two small empty glass bottles and blow across the mouth of each bottle to create a tone. Listening to the other players, choose when to make a sound and how long it lasts. Continue for ten minutes.

Another performance for only two people involved constructing two 4-metre long tubes from plastic water bottles. Small quartz pebbles were dropped into the top of the long hanging tubes by two performers on the first floor of the space, to rhythmically rattle down and drop into a large water-cooler bottle on the ground floor below - one filled with water, the other empty.

These and my other Platform projects explore the production of sonic events through simple gestures and/or the performative application of simple instructions. My interest is to explore the intentional production of randomised sound fields that parallel those naturally produced sound fields we experience and respond to as intriguing, emotive or pleasurable, usually involving some captivating stochastic or aleatoric musicality arising, for example, from transitory natural processes or aggregations of communicating creatures.

Thanks to Tess de Quincey and all the performers in the Platform series who generously enacted these works.

release date: 15 june 2021

This episode is a virtual visit to The Centre for Deep Reading retreat, an annual event staged at a property named Tyraman, on Wonnarua country north west of Sydney in the Hunter Valley between the rural towns of Dungog and Gresford.

The CDR is a labour of love, social relations and experimental cultural enrichment devised and sustained by writer, activist, humanities teacher and fellow pedestrian explorer Nick Keys.

I visited Nick at his apartment in the Sydney suburb of Northbridge to talk with him about the project. In the episode, excerpts from our conversation are interwoven with excerpts from field recordings I made at the 2018 and 2019 CDR retreats, giving some sense of the soundworlds there.

For the retreat I’ve developed an activity we call ‘Deep Listening’ - with deference to Pauline Oliveros of course - wherein I invite groups of five people to sit quietly together in the forest, firstly listening unaided, then for 20 minutes listening under headphones to the amplified presence of whatever sounds occur. The autonomous sounds of creatures, distant rural activities and that moment’s weather are delivered to the listening party via stereo microphones set up out of sight.

It’s an exercise in aural attention that participants report as opening their ears to the complexities of everyday natural sonic production, and instilling a sense of deep calm. Importantly, people report that what and how they hear in subsequent days is altered or heightened.

This episode features the voices of Vanessa Berry, Kathryn Bird , Ross Gibson and Nick Keys along with incidental, less discernible voices of other Centre for Deep Reading participants. The poetry readings and multiple voice event are recordings of Barbara Campbell's 'Out Loud' experiences she developed for the CDR, performed collaboratively by participants.

This episode is a sail along some of the backwaters of lo-fi electronic and digital sound I’ve been experimenting with and exploring over the past few years. My first forays into electromagnetic and digital sonic synthesis were in the late 1970s early 80s on my Fender Rodes 88 piano, a first generation Casio VL-Tone bought by my old friend and fellow sonic explorer adam wolter aka philip toydog - he particulalrly enjoyed the cheesy drum machine presets of that little novelty keyboard calculator - now a collectors item -, followed by various Commodore Amiga computers, a Korg MS-10, numerous tape recorders and then until now the long march of macintosh computers and devices.

The sounds in the multi-tracked composition you’re about to hear were generated using combinations of a handful of small independent devices, some out of kickstarter projects I’ve backed, some home-made, some from the many small scale labs springing up everywhere and some using iOS apps.

I connect or bring devices together and work with them to try and find soundscape registers that interest me - usually slow, meandering musicalities incorporating stochastic and random generative elements, and unusual sonic combinations. I don’t categorise or classify this as music - its more a form of sonic sculpture shaped outside the formal constraints of BPM, tunings, instrument skills or conventional instruments. These are soundscapes for those, like me, with incurable sonic curiosity…

This episode is excerpts from field recordings I made in Japan in 2018. Travelling with three friends, we spent time in Kyoto, Higashi-Hiroshima and Uno, a coastal town providing access to the fabled art islands of the Seto inland sea.

Most of this sonic montage is uninterrupted by explanation other than to introduce recordings made inside the remarkable Teshima Art Museum.

All of us had long wanted to visit the inspiring cultural phenomenon of the Seto Art Islands. From Uno, we ventured to the islands of Teshima and Naoshima to experience the art projects and singular museums - particularly the stunning Teshima Art Museum, a huge concrete dome housing one art project, the creative vision of artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa. The building resembles a huge water drop and the installation inside activates water in subtle, slow and beautiful ways.

The internal space is 60 by 40 meters with no supporting columns. The vast open space reaches only 4.3 meters height, gently rising from the circumference. The floor is polished concrete with barely noticeable shallow depressions scattered around.

Two large oval openings allow wind, light and sound into this unusual volume. Trickles of water continuously emerge from tiny openings in the ground plane, pooling in the slight yet broad depressions to create reflective surface.

The unusual space causes extreme sonic illusions and reverberative feedback. It also acts as a sonic telescope, capturing and amplifying distant sounds.

I visited the Teshima Museum twice. It was raining on the second day and I spent a couple of hours inside the structure watching passing showers fall through the oculus apertures in perfectly defined oval cascades.

While visitors are asked to not take photos inside, the attendants had no issue with me making audio recordings.

This episode concludes with excerpts from my recordings on that rainy day inside the Teshima Art Museum.

In April 2018 I was fortunate to have time at an artist in residency program in the musician’s cottage at Bundanon, on Wodi Wodi and Yuin country, near Nowra on the south coast of New South Wales. Bundanon is a large property on the Shoalhaven River, part farmland, part bushland, which was the home and studio of Australian artist Arthur Boyd. He and his wife Yvonne gifted the property to the nation in 1993 as a cultural trust for the development of artists and arts education. The residency program is an important part of this continuing work.

The musicians cottage is one of the old farm houses converted to include a music studio with grand piano and living quarters. I shared the residency with friend and artist colleague Barbara Campbell who was developing her own new work involving tree rubbings onto copper sheet.

I spent the time constructing various of my aleatoric ensemble assemblages - analogue sonic-kinetic devices basded on small turntables fitted with boxes, tins and containers with marbles, superballs and other objects inside - and recording the unique chaotically looping musicality of various combinations. The grand piano offered an opportunity for some Cageian explorations of chance, mostly dropping superballs onto the inner harp of the grand piano and recording the stochastic results.

A more structured project was recording many individual chords from the sheet music of Erik Satie. Sort of searching for the harmonic DNA of Satie’s perhaps too well-known and carelessly used music.

Other strands of activity were making abstract drawings and watercolours during the day, and making field recordings around the property at any time of day or night.

For this episode of sonic sketchbooks I’ve created a series of new compositions from the recordings made during that 2018 residency.

Bundanon supports new work, research and collaborations by artists and researchers from around the world. 

You can find links to the Bundanon Trust website and find out more about the podcast at the sonic sketchbooks episode guide - sonicsketchbooks.net

In this episode I’m in conversation with Melbourne artists Sonia Leber and David Chesworth who create compelling audio-visual installations using video, sound, architecture, objects and recorded performance. Their works are products of detailed interrogatory research, speculation and conjecture, often arising in the context of artist residency programs in various parts of the world including the UK and Russia.

In 2015 the late, hugely influential Nigerian-born contemporary art curator and writer Okwui Enwezor selected their work 'Zaum Tractor' for inclusion in his personally curated component of the 56th Venice Biennale: All The World’s Futures, just one of the many significant contemporary art contexts in which they’ve exhibited.

In this conversation with the artists in their Melbourne home and me in my Sydney studio, we discuss three projects from their impressive catalogue of work - What Listening Knows, Zaum Tractor, and Where Lakes Once Had Water.

You can find links to their website and vimeo channel where you can view excerpts from their installation projects, at the sonic sketchbooks episode guide sonicsketchbooks.net