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This is a twenty-four-second long composition I made after watching a stand-up comedy set from Julian Baratt. Baratt is a writer, actor and comedian from Leeds most notably known for The Mighty Boosh. In a few bits from his standup, Baratt breaks down the sounds of jungle music with the audience as his instruments. The piece I have made this morning is a response to warped time, pitch-shifting and extreme bpm counts in experimental music that have informed the conceptual basis for my sound studies. Baratt makes an observation here about supersonic speed and the potential ability of sound to subvert consciousness. 

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This video documents a session of artistic research held in the front room of my friend’s house, where we moved out all the furniture and set up a makeshift studio to film a creative discussion about the impact of music on everyday life and listening. The idea was to explore alternative journalistic approaches to the concept of an interview or documentary-style video. I was behind one of the cameras and asking questions to our subjects Amira and Alliyah over the course of an hour and a half whilst they painted responses to their chosen music. We were following on from our interview with Sam Plant, and therefore had an idea of how to approach the questions, however, the entire process was very much improvised and quickly put together. It is worth noting that not everyone who was meant to be involved could be present. Nevertheless, it was one of the most encouraging and energising moments of my research over the past few weeks due it being so organic and unencumbered by too much aesthetic or conceptual consideration. The video shows only fragments of the conversation, and we sat together for a more in-depth discussion after watching back our footage to decide on the successes/failures of this process and how we could expand the idea further. Inevitably the issue as always is the availability of time and space, so we are not sure when we will next have a chance to record like this again due to conflicting schedules, but that’s what has made it this quickly improvised session an important stage in our collective art practice as a reference for future study of sound culture.

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Astrid Gnosis is an artist who just this year has graduated in Sounds Arts and Design at the University of the Arts London. In the above interview with Electronic Beats, she describes her study of subversive and powerful rituals of violence, presenting in her music and visuals a glorification of discomfort, dissatisfaction and self-destruction for transcending the misery of globalised modern capital. The symbolism within her performances and videos reimagine hardcore attitudes and acts of resistance, through the abrasive hybrid gabber drum programming, violent footage and video game graphics, and confrontational lyrics that evoke her ‘Destructivist perspective’ to order, power and acceleration in a world of ‘so-called progress’.  It is encouraging to see fellow Sound Arts students embracing dance culture and hardcore ideology as a medium for meaningful sound arts practices. Astrid Gnosis’ sentiments in the above article resonate vividly with my reading of the article shown below by Hillegonda C. Rietveld, who traces a sonic-cultural cartography of hardcore rave and Dutch Gabber>>

https://openresearch.lsbu.ac.uk/download/bdb0a638fda0bb261611e70442e8221b15d2cf248b88025c8f757661042a5299/123377/Gabber%20Overdrive-RIETVELD-CTM%202018.pdf

I’ve not witnessed a live performance by Astrid Gnosis, but she merges her practice and her research in an imaginative and effective manner. A performance I have witnessed in person that for me bears striking similarities with the work of Astrid Gnosis was a live gig by Pelada

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olcKfXlg1Hw

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I came across this video online and it has carried with me for the past few days. I interpret this video as an artist innovating with a medium that has been artistically reconsidered time and time again. It alludes to the temporal nature of archival media and, perhaps on the reverse of this notion, speaks to the timelessness of digital archives which can call upon images, sounds, events and people at will.

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^ This is the raw audio from a quickly put together interview I produced at a friends house with self-acclaimed ‘bedroom pop’ talent Sam Plant. We setup two microphones in the front living room where we encouraged an atmosphere of free-flowing conversation without too much stress on a traditional interviewer, question, interviewee answer structure. There were some problems with this experience, but overall it was incredibly insightful and somewhat gave me confidence for future creative journalism. At the time it seemed like a big step out of my comfort zone, and I have the feeling my questions were somewhat preoccupied with an agenda of psycho-analytical investigations into the symptomatic nature of pop and everyday listening. The challenge was to allow the interview to flow, and let the interviewee articulate themself without pushing topics into the discourse too quickly or without connection. All in all, I was encouraged by the outcome, and have indeed a new appreciation for Sam’s work. We discussed sonic influences of his upbringing, mental health and how to navigate a career within the modern music industry.

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In his installation ‘Structural Solutions To The Question Of Being’, Mark Fell reflects the attitudes that Acid House and Rave culture presented in a search fo alternative way of being to people living in the calcifying misery of neoliberalism through the 1980′s and 1990′s. There is a clear symptomatic distinction made about the sociocultural and musical phenomena of his past with the acceleratingly pathogenic social and political environment he lived through.

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This video, above being such an effective portrayal of 90′s Hardcore hyperstitional warfare and afro-futurist dystopian breakbeatology, made me contemplate the budget costs necessary for top draw music video production.

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The attached video is part of the audio/visual element of an installation I made for last year’s Amelioration exhibition at Gallery46 in Whitechapel. The piece contemplated living with a skin disease. The installation consisted of a collection of objects and sculptural detritus against the gallery wall, with printed photographs stuck against the wall above the table. A pair of headphones played the above soundpiece, whilst a video projector cast the video over the wall where the photographs were placed. The concept was to create a conjunction between the change in intensity and timbre of the soundpiece, with the changing colour of the light from the video projector, which faded from red to white. The photographs depicted white skin with red rashes and cuts, which were not as obvious when the video showed red light. The soundpiece was a composition of recordings and samples layered and affected through an old mixer and digital software, and arranged in Ableton. The foley and recordings involved sawing materials (wood, bread, bone and flesh) and sounds of industry (construction, drilling). I then recorded the voices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8o2R0K5xr0&list=LLc-KIaheCkkF94e3uuTRZBw&index=112&t=430s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0jX1Qh2Hwo

Maggie Roberts is another artist and theorist working in a similar vein to Mark Fisher and Sadie Plant. In the above video, she traces the history of Orphan Drift, and the concept of cybernetics as tools of cultural necessity.

The sounds I did not record myself were videos from Youtube, but received the same as the live recoridngs, though mixing was required as the sources were varied.

Pitch shifting and time-stretching samples are mainstay processes in my soundwork. Warping time and frequency is an effective disorient for listeners. Applying this to vocal recordings can generate a sonic dehumanisation and alienation of the self, as can be heard on both Katasonix and Orphan Drift. Foley and field recording have become important aspects of my sonic practice. To a certain extent, live recording keeps my creative motivations from stagnating into habitual laptop production, and allows me to practice listening and documenting of physical/sonic spaces I find myself in. A technical understanding of microphones and recorders out in the field is applicable to many sonic practice situations and continues to inform my study of contemporary sound art.

I have developed my strategies for layering samples and spaces since making the recordings for the exhibition. Just as a note on composition and mixing, returning to older sound pieces that use atmospheres gives the advantage of a completely fresh ear, and as such have developed my learning habout resonances, tones and frequencies  present in live recordings, especially comparing between headphones and studio monitiors with a gallery space, which can have a huge effects upon listening. The sounds I did not record myself were videos from Youtube, but received the same treatment as the live recoridngs, though mixing was required as the sources were varied.

Mark Peter Wright is an artist and writer who has led me to discover so much about the philosophies of sonic and technological reproduction, perception, simulation, and the ecology of microphone recording. A useful and highly relatable quote for the purposes of my project from an interview Mark gave with Julia Yezbick in Sensate Journal:

‘That’s how I research; it’s quite fragmented, things come and go, and writing doesn’t hit the Word document fully formed. Thoughts become illuminated then obscured and the framework for what is deemed “research” is constantly challenged and agitated. So I was interested in how these could re-perform that process whilst at the same time, through their constant obfuscation, disrupt how academic research becomes ossified through text and referencing orthodoxies.