Author: Patrick Shaw

In how I’ve sourced material in the grit of the earthen work life, I see parallels with land art; trying to convey the sensual experience of working in the rural cold, with a medium shackled to the necessary equipment and infrastructure of the sanitised institution. Many works in the land art field (haha) are often geographically and semantically decentralised, that’s what inspires me. Photographic evidence of the piece may be all that returns to the civilised art gallery world, an emissary for the distant artwork crouched alone on the ground somewhere. That kind of resolute engagement with the earthen world outside of the institutional bubble appeals to my perspective, and calls back to my earlier post concerning multichannel installations.

There’s something very humanly structuralist about English sculptor and landscape artist Richard Long’s work, taking the sprawl and dissolution and wildness of natural elements, of the land, and straightening it. Aligning it in lines and circles, colour and texture arranged and curated. In some hyperbolic sense, it’s an almost offensive practice. In another, wonderfully childlike and pure. It reminds me of collecting rocks, grasses or feathers from the land as a child, (and still now and always) the gathering of the world in an ordered way, out of a fascination. In many ways, I feel like this directly correlates with my project, and field recording as an act. It’s taking the land and transmuting it. It’s taking.

I also seek to problematise my work, or interrogate it. Why choose building as a subject, and why there? I want to engage the bias that ripples through the project. The rurality of its setting is integral to my aesthetic view of it, a dwelling coming up, out of mud and clay and staking a claim on the territory. The people erecting the building, structuring the material, are held indeterminately on that land, divided in responsibility. I think I am also drawing a line between art and life. I want the art to just be a portal, holding open a window, enabling what can ultimately only be the briefest impression of that life. I might perceive the art life as necessarily distinct from material life to help us survive, depending on what day you ask me.

Making a work surrounding an observation and structuring of the labour of others, (in which I would rather be participating) discomforts me. Yet, in a sense, the piece is about survival; it’s a running, flowing briefing and debriefing of this kind of employment it can be for me, and a psychoacoustic, cursorily sensory version for the listener. Bringing the outside in, and bringing the inside out. Knotty, trying to make sense of these facets for myself.

A (lengthy) anecdote/side note:

Something I found interesting in a parasocial sense; Richard Long created A Line Made by Walking while he was a student at what is now UAL’s Central Saint Martins, and during his regular and lengthy commute from Bristol to London, he stopped in a random clearing in Wiltshire to walk back and forth, photographing the resultant path. On a recent Thursday guest lecture I had every intention of attending, my 70 mile commute from Sussex ground to a halt 50 miles from London, because of a now-routine train failure. The expense being what it is, and my schedule already ruined, I gave up and traveled back to a random station and walked the remaining 13 miles home through lane, forest, field and dark. I think I’m pulling at the tenuous thread connecting me to Long’s story, UAL, the commute, the importance of being in the land, walking. It also connects to the following guest lecture that I’ll write about in more detail later. All that to say, I find great inspiration and enrichment outside in a wandering meditation, connected to the land and the physicality of engaging with it by happy, motivated circumstance.

An issue I take with spatial sound is its relative inaccessibility. Simply put, if you don’t have the speaker system, you can’t do it. Collectively, as a cohort, all our assignments have to be necessarily filtered, mixed and finalised through the octophonic ring and the speaker system in M108. To me, this is somewhat emblematic of the unevenly-weighted practice; in favour of the expensive and industrial and the gallery. That being said, algorithmic systems for headphones, like that which Dolby Atmos or Dear Reality provide, bridge that gap with more equity. But it’s still inescapable that they remain an emulation of real-world aural phenomena, experienced solitarily.

I have previously thought about how I’ve found Dear Reality’s VR plugin to sound artificial, but I perceive that view as more of a taste mismatch. It’s a paradigm often suited for game audio or diffusive, electronic music, both worlds I wouldn’t say I have carved out a hollow to sit within (yet). My instinctual first-thoughts when I create art for my own sake find enough immersion, a slippery term, in stereo. Even mono! I have been listening to the newly released Night Palace (STEMS edition) by Mount Eerie, and I have deeply enjoyed the bounce down of a single, mono stem. Close details, unmastered, noticing each faint punch-in through long stretches of nothing at all. Besides my enduring investment in the artist, and indulging the part of my brain that likes taking things apart to see how they work, I think it’s also a reaction to a recent overload of sound.

The spatial sound pieces we have encountered as a cohort have been busy. A critical problem with the availability of spatial audio, is that it is not only difficult to make works independent of an elaborate speaker system, but it is also difficult to source and experience artists’ works independent of an elaborate speaker system. Outside of cinema sound, the only artistic works I have encountered have been in lecture. The spatial work of John Chowning which was introduced to us was somewhat baffling to me. Scientifically, Chowning’s research into the simulation of spatial effects is eminently useful, (2004, pp. 2) ‘in order to simulate the distances cue one must synthesize and control the reverberant signal as well as the direct signal such that the intensity of the direct signal decreases more with distance than does the reverberant signal’. Despite Chowning’s clear technological understanding of the medium, compositionally speaking, I don’t profess to ‘get it’.

It may replicate the expressive qualities of a ‘space’, but to what end? I don’t find it a space I wish to linger in. The randomness and discordance makes me feel like trapped in the most underwhelming

we have heard the work of high frequency scatter of beep boops that wander.

Here’s my mean-spirited joke comparison I stumbled across, to round this out. I can’t help but hear Resident Evil’s infamous ‘Basement Theme’ in Chowning’s ‘Turenas’. One is held in regard as the creative expression of an audio and synthesis polymath, the other is a weird internet meme from a Playstation game. Which is which?

As an artmaking and compositional tool I have had very little contact with, it felt prudent to research multichannel composition from its arguable conception. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s impressionistic 1955-56 electronic composition Gesang der Jünglinge, is a major early work in musique concrete, designed to be performed in a multichannel format,

I’m struck by its relative agelessness. Gesang der Jünglinge could very easily slip into the tracklist of a Oneohtrix Point Never or Galen Tipton album; a forward-thinking, futurist apogee of what we could call glitch today. Incredible to consider, given that it was composed just a decade after the second world war, fourteen years before the moon landing.

Revealingly, Metzger (2004, pp. 705) describes Gesang der Jünglinge: ‘The piece clearly holds to the idea of purity. Out of all the depicted means of securing that state, it adheres to one: refinement. The biblical story is not lost on the work. Gesang, however, rewrites the tale – yet more blasphemy. Having brought in outside materials, be they pure or impure, the work must make them suitable for the pure realm of electronic sound. Gesang surrounds the child’s voice with electronic fire.’

The blaspheming characterisation Metzger observes in the work is interesting; Stockhausen allegedly intended for the four-channel piece to be installed in Cologne Cathedral as a sacred mass, despite a lack of evidence. This subversive, yet seemingly enthusiastic perspective for his work is unusual, and inspiring. I also like his interpretation of electronic sound as fire, it helps me see an elemental quality in Gesang der Jünglinge.

Despite Stockhausen’s serially defined, carefully plotted work, I do feel the piece lacks a compositional cohesion. Yet, I also feel utterly unjustified in saying that. Who am I to qualitatively judge cohesion in avant-garde art? I think my brain has been somewhat fried with prolonged exposure. What is up and what is down? Questions rise continually, and my eyebrows arch. Cornelius Cardew (1974, pp. 36), a once-assistant to Stockhausen, surveys the effects of the hollowing-out of signifiers on the audience in a way I find interesting: ‘Any content, as well as the dynamism that is characteristic of ‘saying something’, is automatically lost if one aspect of the language is systematically altered. But the resulting emptiness does not antagonise the bourgeois audience which is confident of its ability to cultivate a taste for virtually anything.’ Cardew’s cartoonishly Maoist fixations aside, I believe his observation of the avant-garde audience’s omni-acceptance to have a validity. I return to my joke comparison. I don’t mean to denigrate, this random flash of comparison actually raises some questions for me about audience. Why is one atonality held up as achievement and the other ridiculed? How much procedural obscuration until a ‘point’ dissolves for the listener?

While I feel it’s naïve to assume everyone is, or will be, on board with your cultural movement, I feel it’s equally naïve to hold artists accountable for tangential, wider systemic societal problems. Yes, Cardew is seeking to target the very audience he criticises, but he’s also yelling into the same very select ant farm. I think this is why I want to engage with a subject matter more grounded, more earthen and identifiable.

References:

Chowning, J. M. (2004) The Simulation of Moving Sound Sources. Stanford: The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Stanford University

Metzger, J. M. (2004) ‘The Paths from and to Abstraction in Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge’, Modernism/modernity, 11(4), pp. 705

Cardew, C. (1974) Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. London: Latimer New Dimensions Limited

As a human with uncertain vocations, I have always egocentrically mythologised myself as being a ‘normal, regular person’ looking in on the absurd art world. I think it is all too easy to dehumanise those of us working in the trades as unsophisticated, especially when (we) artists position themselves (ourselves) as interrogators of the world. The reverse is also true, the fiscal world will endlessly I suspect this is where my certain bone-deep resistance to, and discomfort of, banal theoretics comes from, because I never had anyone to share these ideas with. Everyone works, in some capacity, and that work shapes us. I wish to avoid the unavoidable by drawing from my own lived experience. While I may be extractively treating this world as subject, I am definitively not the other, an ignorant outsider. I assimilated into this hard-edged world filled with pride and dysfunction, and only by ascending through the mundanity, brutality and challenge of the work, can I now actually see the pregnant space that it is for artistic exploration. A great, refreshing voice that was shown to me was that of Tim Ingold (2013, pp. 47). His writings intersect the art world and material reality in a revealing way, as he observes: ‘Building is an activity; it is what builders do. Add the article, however, and the activity is brought to a close. Movement is stilled, and where people had once laboured with tools and materials, there now stands a structure – a building – that shows every sign of permanence and solidity.’

‘These definitions, however, belie the creativity of the ‘messy practices’ that give rise to real buildings. Whether of sketching, tracing, modelling, staking out, digging, cutting, laying, fixing or joining, all involve care, judgement and aforethought, and are carried on within worldly fields of forces and relations. None can be placed unequivocally on one side or the other of any distinction of fundamental ontological import, such as between intellectual conception and mechanical execution.’ (pp. 59)

I booked out a Zoom H3-VR from the ORB and brought it home to Sussex, seeking to explore the ambisonic paradigm within a sonically active environment. Spatially representing a construction site, I felt, could be enhanced by ambisonic recording; situating the listener on site, to simulate the effect of being among the workers. To become, even just tangentially, without any expended effort or blood, sweat and tears, one of them.

I was concerned about inadvertently demeaning them and their work by treating them as a curious subject. However, the emptiness of the moments and sounds captured, the unguardedness of the conversation renders the recordings as an authentic capture of only that moment, as it happened. That is not to forgo all problematic qualities of the act of field recording, but I was disarmed by the men’s receptiveness to the process.

I recorded in a number of disparate locations across the relatively small site, (three to four distinct plots designated for building, with two complete and a further two in the planning phase) with a view to capturing distinctly differing activities, and reflecting the wide range of works occurring on any given day. First, I recorded Dave fitting door liners, then Will and Dalo cutting and glueing floor tiles, and then Jorge, Ryan and Rees carrying out tree surgery and digging a trench. Alongside these broader physical activities are subtleties of conversation and interpersonal dynamics, these smaller facets are almost what excite me more. Relating one character to another, authentically, for the listener is a conceit I want to explore.

References:

Ingold, T. (2007) Against Soundscape. in A. Carlyle (Ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre.

Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Oxon: Routledge.

I started by recording a sequenced passage of a Roland JV-1080 synthesizer preset into Ableton, then with the Radial X-Amp sending that signal back out through a Marshall AS50D guitar amplifier, as well as Turbo Rat distortion and Electro Harmonix Cathedral Stereo Reverb pedals. I have been increasingly engaged with this cross-pollinating mode of making; relating the digital and analog together symbiotically. A large challenge, particularly with the Radial X-Amp, is controlling feedback when re-amping. I’m unsure if it’s a quirk of the hardware itself, or central to the nature of re-amping, but balancing an adequate line level output without overloading the input is difficult. I also feel it’s rich for colouring, harnessing and exploring new facets of previously recorded sound.

I then experimented with recording that re-amped signal from Ableton to tape on the Tascam 424MKIII, then drastically slowing it down. This process has a way of rendering a hitherto comprehensible sound as unknowable and mysterious. I think, however, in the case of this experiment, the results seemed a little too science fiction. The feedback in particular, sounded like a computer in the original Star Trek, or Bebe and Louis Barron’s work on Forbidden Planet. The compression of the tape only adding to that quality. Also, some ice scraping sounds snuck in by virtue of using an older tape. Interesting!

Alongside these, I took another sequenced refrain from the JV-1080 and sampled it with Ableton’s Simpler. What was a slow, uneasy orchestral passage that wavered in pitch became a high, fast phrase when applied in Slice mode. It almost resembles what could be a beat, which is not my forte at all. This is also to say, I presently have no idea how a beat, or any overt synthesizer music could be thematically applicable in my more ecological, spatial field recording project, but the processes used in experimenting will help inform and inspire me as I configure this work.

‘First and foremost, ambient poetics is a rendering. I mean this in the sense developed by the concrete music composer Michel Chion. Rendering is technically what visual- and sonic-effects artists do to a film to generate a more or less consistent sense of atmosphere or world… This rendering, like Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum, pertains to a copy without an original.’ pp. 35

‘In Thoreau’s Walden the distant sound of bells brings to mind the atmosphere in which they resonate:

All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. (Thoreau, Walden, 168-169)

In this remarkable passage, Thoreau theorizes the medial qualities of ambient poetics. Notice how “strained”, “air” and “melody” are all synonyms for music. Thoreau is describing how sound is “filtered”-a common idea since the advent of the synthesizer, which electronically filters sound waves.’ pp. 39

Morton, T. (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press

‘Nevertheless, the stereotype contains some truth. Blue-collar jobs are seen as physically taxing, often dangerous, tedious, and, for the most part, mindlessly repetitive. A popular song of the mid-1950s, “Sixteen Tons,” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, neatly captures the spirit ‘ pp.32

Gini, Al. (2000) My Job, My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual. New York, London: Routledge.

From our lectures, the majority of examples and previous student work shown to us were inherently musical. From breakbeats used to demonstrate the various software’s routing capabilities, to a work that seemingly sampled vinyl crackle, music has been core to this specialism so far, at least as I see it.

A reference point that resurfaced for me was Sonic Youth and their self-titled debut EP. I went back to check what I thought I remembered reading in Byron Coley’s (2005) liner notes; ‘Edson’s pulsing drums and Kim’s huge bass sound hold things together while Lee runs a contact mic’d electric drill through a wah-wah pedal’. A band known for invention, this weird choice on this weird song always stuck with me. It may be an obvious contradiction, but I am interested in bringing the everyday abrasion of power tools into music, abandoning categorical purity. The uneasy balance of work’s noise and noise’s music.

Reflecting on conversations and experiences I’ve had at work, sonic touchstones. As a builder, a lot of work consists of being held inside the ribcage of building until it’s finished. An odd sonic event I remember distinctly was Metallica’s ‘Seek & Destroy’ looping in a reflective tiled hallway. The suspended, surreal sense of entrapment by Hetfield’s voice and the recurrent riffing marked me. The rising irritation among the crew. Demystifying it, a coworker’s Amazon Music playlist simply got stuck on repeat, but being forced to coexist within the song’s world, its beginnings and ends and shape rendered interminable through the way it harshly shimmered off the tiles and plaster, was undeniably affecting. This is a tonal palette I am interested in exploring and representing in my piece.

Informing this thought too, is Chat Pile, a recent discovery. Their deranged and highly postmodern aesthetic aligning the group’s work as a disarming representation of an industrial midwest horror. Drawing on the noise rock lineage of Steve Albini’s Big Black and The Jesus Lizard, as well as Nirvana’s more offbeat B-sides, much of their work concerns itself with the darkest skew of the seemingly mundane; American urban planning, homelessness, the Bible thumper.

A notable song title is ‘grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg’, referring to the infamous purple McDonalds mascot. This demonstrates their highly modern, unique brand of American Midwest malaise, and seeing the pulpy (and genuine) horror within. I love the tonal contrast this subject matter creates with the violent madness of the sound, it’s a dark, dark meld of ironic humour and deadly severity. I am not seeking to create something so brutalist or abrasively expressive, but the rawness of the group’s subject matter is inspirational to me. Also relating the specificity of a geographic region’s characteristics is something I am deeply interested in.

And so, again, I have returned to guitar. I am nagged by a voice that’s telling me this is not the project for it, but these inspirations are still formative. The larger interest I am focussing on, is an interplay between dynamic aural phenomena and the perceived real world of sound. Making music with the mundane. Most crucially, an intrinsic associative link with construction is the intrusion of its noise. How to harness that, rather than prod the listener in a way that may come off as juvenile antagonism?

I experimented with making recordings of my dad’s old belt sander, gritty and nasty sounding, and accompanying it with guitar via the two input channels on the Marshall AS50D guitar amplifier. I liked the sonic palette, but also I am concerned about colouring the working experience with a particular emotion; leading the listener too transparently, or perhaps even unintentionally. I think that darker, isolated tones are my first creative instinct, regardless of material inspiration. I think this is a quality I will have to monitor and carefully examine as I further work on this project.

References:

Coley, B. (2005) ‘In Memory’. In Sonic Youth [CD liner notes]. EU: Geffen Records

Metallica (1983) ‘Seek & Destroy’, Kill ‘Em All [CD]. New York: Megaforce.

Chat Pile (2024) ‘I Am Dog Now’, Cool World [CD]. San Francisco: The Flenser.

In selecting our specialisms for the second year, I chose Option A: Spatialisation for Installation & Performance. At present, I would consider myself somewhat agnostic with regards to multichannel installations. I have always held a shameful, discreditably unshakeable scepticism of the gallery space. Especially in London; a city that feels oddly dislocated from the outside world, yet grossly boastful of its own significance, a narrow shim of reality. The uncomfortable intermix that’s created when the individual stimulation of each artwork meets a spatial sterility.

Taking space within a gallery is like terraforming; creating an opening to a new world inside another altogether vacuous one. I am curious to explore the possibilities of an interaction between the distal space and the enacted space, blurring the boundary between performed sound and organically documented sound.

At home in Sussex, I made ‘blank slate’ field recordings of a bank of trees in the wind, and then sheep eating cut branches with my Zoom H1n. To illustrate the difference with more movement across the stereo field, I have also included a field recording of delivery motorcycles in the rain, that I made in the summer in South Korea. Making mono and stereo versions of each recording, I found that they have wildly different effects and potential uses. With stereo information, we can parse out environments and the actions occurring within them with greater clarity as the listener. Mono recordings squash the sound, rendering less spatially distinct, and more as an artefact that could be placed in a wider work.

This is what caused me to think of the acousmatic, wondering how rigid or elastic that definition could be. Sheep eating in mono is arguably unidentifiable, it could be mistaken for wind in the leaves. Yet in stereo, the sonic event becomes more apparent, however slightly. Psychoacoustically, aural space helps the listener map what is occurring. Moreover, I don’t believe anyone could identify the source of this field recording without some guidance. Such is the elusive nature of recorded sound, and the murkiness of intention.

I worry it can be very easy to stray into an unwanted between-space when exclusively dealing with the acousmatic, where a total absence of signifying footholds brings an apathetic response. In numerous prior lectures on the topic, I have found myself listening to complex effects processing at length, wondering what more I am supposed to feel or comprehend. I am interested in the earthen, the human, the mystery gleam from within the obvious. Significantly, I feel keenly drawn to ‘less is more’, a dawning awareness. What can that mean?

Already, I find myself interested in the various nested cultural and contextual evocations that intentional source-bonding gives rise to. There could be a lot to explore there. As Denis Smalley (2007, pp. 38) states, ‘on the other hand, the kinds of spatial forms and organisation found in the natural environment could be taken on by spectromorphologies whose surface identity might appear tangential in source-cause terms. The idea of source-bonded space is never entirely absent.’ I am compelled to violate the obsession with the acousmatic veil by pursuing the facets of enacted space and aural inference.

References:

Smalley, D. (2007) ‘Space-form and the acousmatic image’, Organised Sound, 12(1), pp. 38