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Record Collector Jul 2013 issue
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CREATIVE RESEARCH INTO SOUND ARTS PRACTICE
SOUND PORTAL
CRiSAP members participate in
Sounding Space http://soundingspace.tumblr.com
the BE OPEN Sound Portal houses finely-tuned ambisonic audio-technology to create a unique environment that delivers a pure acoustic experience. This unique structure sets the scene for the Sounding Space Symposium. The Sound Portal is the result of a collaboration between BE OPEN, a foundation that supports innovation and creativity, and The London Design Festival. Designed by ARUP. SOUND WORKS FOR THE SOUND PORTAL The Sound Portal is an especially designed sound space at the college that has had works prepared for it. As part of the running programme, CRiSAP members have composed bespoke works for the three tiered surround sound system. These works will be played throughout the symposium and by appointment after it finishes. More information about these works, below.
STRATA.................................................................................................................................................... Environmental recordings by: Brigitte Hart (LCC) Sophie Mallett (LCC) Yiorgis Sakellariou (LCC). Edited and composed in collaboration with Mark Peter Wright (CRiSAP). A collaborative sound composition structured as a vertical journey through some of London’s most evocative and memorable sounds. Each artist explored the ‘sonic strata’ of the city by gathering recordings from the underground to the Thames, street markets to protests, and up into the atmosphere of the sky itself. The piece utilises the three tiered, spiraled speaker structure of the Sound Portal as a structuring device for the overall composition. The result is a unique sonic cross section of the city that draws upon ideas of stratification from geology and archeology.
SOUNDING THE PORTAL.................................................................................................................... Tansy Spinks in a co-production involving LCC/CRiSAP staff Angus Carlyle and Cathy Lane and LCC Sound students: Emanuele Cendron, Aurelie Mermod, Sunil Chandy
If the Be Open Sound Portal is considered to be in effect, a giant speaker that we enter, then what would happen if we inverted its role and gave the structure the ability to be a sound producing device?
Situated as it is alongside Tate Britain, on a riverside site which is rich in history (as a marsh, a panoptic designed prison, a military medical academy and latterly an art school), the portal will function as a kind of instrument to be played. Recordings will then be made and diffused back into the structure. Rather like artist Robert Morris’s seminal piece of 1961, Box with the Sound of its Own Making, the structure will house and broadcast internally the sound of its own playing.
Grateful thanks to portal designer Stephen Philips and Ormiston Wire
ATC ZERO.............................................................................................................................................. Nye Parry Taking as its starting point two recordings I made in London after the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which left all air traffic grounded for several days (a condition known as ATC Zero), the piece moves through an invented landscape of exterior and interior spaces (including that of the Portal itself) and explores the simultaneous feelings of openness and enclosure experienced in that time.
WHERE ONCE WERE WHALES.......................................................................................................... Cathy Lane Crofting life on the islands of the Outer Hebrides has always been intimately connected with the sea - as a source of food and livelihood from fish to kelp as well as a source of myth and legend. The title of this piece refers to the deserted whaling station at Bunavoneader on the isle of Harris which was successfully run by Norwegians employing local people, at various times during the twentieth century. It finally closed in 1953. Today the primary local catches are lobster, crab and shellfish which are mainly sold to the foreign market although whales can still be spotted around the coast and occasionally one gets washed up on a deserted Hebridean beach.
‘Where Once Where Whales’ uses monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides as well as material from existing oral history archives.?The voices include those of Donald MacSween of Ness, Harris and John Maclean from Berneray recorded by Cathy Lane; Seonag McVicar talking about working on fishing boats as part of the Taigh Chearsabhagh oral history archive in Lochmaddy and Curstaidh Mackay reciting a rhyme about food (particularly shellfish) boiling times was recorded in 1977 by D.A. MacDonald for the School of Scottish Studies. The waulking song ‘Cha Deid Mi Do Dh'Fhear Gun Bhata’ was recorded by Alan Lomax. More information about the sounds and their sources can be found on the enclosed sheet. This piece is part of a larger work in progress that attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. “The Hebrides Suite’ is due to be released as a CD by Gruenrekorder later in 2013.
REMEMBERING WORLDS..................................................................................................................
WORKSHOPS
‘Sound, Place, Memory’, led by CRiSAP developed three artist-led two day workshops that combined theoretical insights and practical inspiration. The workshop themes were chosen to scope the field of potential responses to our heard world and its inhabitants – the vibrations of molecules through materials, water and the air and how we can capture these and record with them; the rendering of acoustic experience and remembered association into words that make sense of the idea of ‘sonic distance’ and meaning; and the sounds of the everyday as narratives that can be negotiated through the human voice.
18–19 April - Jez riley French: A Quiet Position: The Act and Art of Field Recording 25–26 April - Daniela Cascella: Listening, Writing Sound, Thinking Sound 2–3 May - Felicity Ford: Field Recording Stories
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