|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CD
|
|
SNS 025CD
|
Audio Archaeology Series Volume 3: Brest. Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France. It is composed of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the '70s and '80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document recordist Michel's tastes in music and radio programs of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations. In the composition, family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
CREP 102LP
|
"This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels -- around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved." --Don Draper
Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind's eye -- projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listener's mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape-recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the '60s and '70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from Vernon's own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that he has collected over the past twenty years. Using these found slideshow commentaries as a framework, a series of musical soundscapes have been created to bring the absent images to life, activating the listeners' imagination in the classic tradition of "cinema for the ears". It's a little like looking through a family photo album where only the handwritten captions and mounting corners remain; the photographs themselves have all been removed. The evocative rattle and clack of the projector shuffles through different slides as the fragile voices of tour guides accompany you on a sonic journey that fractures time -- and through the cracks, the past bleeds through into the present.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
KYE 044LP
|
"Kye is proud to present Lend An Ear, Leave A Word the new LP from Glasgow's Mark Vernon. 'The pieces composed for this album combine field recordings of contemporary Lisbon with found tape recordings from the past; reel-to-reel tapes, micro-cassettes and Dictaphones collected from the Feira de Ladra market, a popular and lively flea market in the Alfarma district. Each tape recording is an audio snapshot of a specific time; a family album in sound, a musical performance, a compilation of treasured music, or even just the fun of playing around with a tape recorder captured for posterity. Every thoughtless edit or push of the record button teleports us to a different time and place. The musical material extracted from the tapes is also an evocative signifier that locates it within a specific era. The interesting thing is how the tapes accumulate different strata of time even within a single side. There are consecutive chronological recordings but also sequences with unexpected breakthroughs where the user has carelessly fast-forwarded through the tape, randomly 'dropping-in' new recordings. These accidental edits create instantaneous new collages of sounds and voices. I have endeavored to retain the essence of these unintentional edits and unexpected outbursts in the pieces I have assembled here. The noisy whir and clicking of the various tape mechanisms is evident on many of the found recordings. As the material is sped up and slowed down it acts as an internal clock, a continuous, steady marker of time, almost like the second hand of a timepiece. All of the pieces contained here within explore one particular environment - the city of Lisbon. Field recordings by their very nature are time-based but the introduction of found tapes into the mix expands the time-scale of these studies from just the short period spent in the city making recordings, backwards to possibly forty or more years in the past. It is a portrait in time *and* place, an archaeology of sound. The result of the audio flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shores of low commerce in the flea markets of Lisbon.' --Mark Vernon. Lend An Ear, Leave A Word arrives in a full color matte stock sleeve with insert and download card that features additional pieces left off the LP due to time constraints. Mastered by Jason Lescalleet in an edition of 400."
|