sound and stuff

where?

Where in a couple of senses. Firstly santiago's considering whether to get out of town with both cassette recorders and a resonant bowl to record a long minimal piece. The reasoning behind this should become apparent. Secondly one of the motivations for this is to explore where my sound poetry's going. I've been interested for a long time in incorporating environmental sounds which has begun to happen recently. This begins to take the work perhaps closer to sound art. At present it is also becoming increasingly problematic to introduce language or language-like vocalisations into pieces without them seeming completely out of place. Hence at this time of year it's always unpredictable shifts closer to conventional poetry than previous CD-Rs while the forthcoming South only admits clicks drones and other non-linguistic sounds. More on this later.

buddha machine

There was a recent post about the Buddha Machine 2.0 I bought. Having lived with that for some time and having used it within a couple of tracks I decided to get myself one of the original model Buddha Machines. I don't want to revisit the whole review but I would like to make a few observations.

Visually I like the original model more than the second edition. The on/off light stands out from the body of the machine as does the toggle switch to shift between loops. The volume control headphone socket and DC socket are labelled in Chinese. Other aspects are more satisfying too - the on/off volume wheel clicks off which is more conventional than the set up on the 2.0 but leads to less anxiety about accidentally damaging it. It's also nice to have the option of plugging in the Buddha Machine. The two improvements in the 2.0 are the pitchbend which wasn't on the original and the fact that the battery compartment is less alarmingly tight.

While thinking about buying the new machine I revisited some of the reviews and was struck by how a lot of the negative reviews kind of missed the point about the Buddha Machine. It plays loops. It has a limited number of loops of limited length. It does not automatically cycle through the loops or vary them. Why would it? Several pieces mention John Cage Steve Reich and Brian Eno. Again the Buddha Machine may superficially occupy similar areas but again it is a machine that plays loops. Some people say they were irritated by the loops repeating and not changing or moving on and spent time thinking about when they would have to change the loop. Well I sometimes change the loops but I can't say I ever expend any mental energy on it. It seems that people may be listening to the Buddha Machine in the way they might listen to an album a concert or their mp3 player - either as a distraction or as something that requires the whole of your attention all the time. For me it's something that makes a kind of bed of noise which your attention can dip in and out of. And that brings us to another of the absurd challenges - that the sound quality is poor. Well yes it is. But what do you expect from a small cheap device? And doesn't listening to anything from a purely audiophile standpoint get in the way of the experience of listening? For me the sound quality and the noise on some of the recordings on both machines adds to the charm.

Sound quality is an interesting question that I've written about recently. Again April's CD-R is extremely rough and noisy - and is a sound that may be revisited - whereas May's CD-R and the piece lost buildings that I posted a couple of days ago are about as pristine as I can currently manage. It's a matter of what's appropriate for the material but the most important thing is the feeling of a piece. If a piece sounds right then it doesn't matter if the sound's a bit crappy.

wire magazine - momus epiphanies

Wire magazine has a regular feature at the back called Epiphanies where musicians write about influential experiences. Last month they had Simon Fisher Turner - who was responsible for the bulk of Derek Jarman's soundtracks - on portable sound recorders. Since my thinking was in that area I managed to get a lot from that piece. This month they have Momus on quiet music just after I've recorded the quietest sound poems yet and am considering making more. It's an interesting article - well worth your time. Among other things it covers a current area of interest which is the way that music and speech can interact with environmental sounds. Particularly how your attitude affects your response. If you want to hear every detail and be immersed in the sound then external sounds are a distraction and become annoying. If you're not especially concerned with every detail then it's a more relaxing experience and you can incorporate the different sources into a single experience.

2 hours recording

Tonight I spent a couple of hours recording myself playing with a resonant bowl and trying to incorporate sounds from the flat as well as using phonemes. Ultimately none of it was worth using. There were two problems. One is the fact that I'm not a musician and find counting while I'm making a piece difficult so wasn't able to structure what I was doing as I would have liked. The other was that frankly the attempts to use even phonemes let alone words was just cheesy. It sounded awful and didn't work with the other sounds I was making. I'm not sure why this is - whether it's a matter of confidence or whether I simply haven't developed sufficient variety of techniques and mastery of what I'm doing with my voice. Or even more likely both.

But I was happy with the sounds of the bowl and with a slowed down recording of a vocal drone on one of my cassette recorders. And typically given my attempts over close to four months to minimise external noise in my recordings there wasn't enough environmental sound. Hence the desire to head out to the hills or the beach or the side of a road or railway line to try again with just the bowl and the drone to make something mainly quiet and uneventful. This may be an indication of what June's CD-R will sound like or it may be nothing of the sort.

philoctetes

And because that's where my head is I've been listening as I type to the Philoctetes Center roundtable from 14 March Dancing on the Ceiling: Music and the Brain. I'll have to listen again but I've managed to pick up a few things and I'd recommend it as I would all Philoctetes events. One question frustratingly not answered maybe because there's not a lot of evidence is that while early on the assertion was made that people are observed to be relaxed by music it was never examined as to whether this was a cultural reaction as opposed to something caused by the music. Certainly it's contributed to my thinking about the relationship between my sound poetry and both language and music. Especially with regard to my wanting it to occupy an ambiguous territory and whether I should perhaps be more abrasive difficult and discordant.

No doubt Earth at Islington Mill tomorrow will contribute further to this mass of ideas.