It’s Got Knitsonik On It

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knitsonik, knitting, podcasts, sound art, sound design

I accidentally gave myself a bit of writers block last week, as I had two more posts I wanted to make about the Inverness Film Festival but wasn’t feeling at all inspired to write them. Therefore I couldn’t write anything else until I’d written them. Completely logical.

Yesterday, I finished catching up with a really interesting sound-related podcast, Knitsonik, so I decided to write about that instead – and hopefully kick the writer’s block to the curb while I’m at it.

Approximately a year ago, at a friend’s birthday party, I got into a discussion with someone about my twin passions of sound design and knitting. Now the relationship between these two things is completely clear to me, but is not something that is always obvious to other people. In fact, until that point the only person I knew who really shared these as twin, interweaved passions, was my former tutor from my masters course Gary Hayton and he’s now a Textile Artist who applies Fibonacci number sequences to knitted fabric. So to casually meet some in everyday life who not only didn’t think it was an odd combination of passions but did in fact tell me they knew someone who had done their PHD in that sort of thing and that they had a podcast about the subject. The idea that there were enough people into both of those things to sustain a podcast was both surprising and delightful.

(The exception is generally if you’re really into maths. Maths geeks – and occasionally engineers – who knit will nod understandingly and talk to me about Fibonacci sequences and the golden ratio and then be horrified that I’m not only not a maths geek but that I don’t actually like maths. Most sound designers seem to come from either a maths/engineering background or a music composition background, I’m neither, I’m first and foremost a craftsperson. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I was altering a knitting pattern the other week – I didn’t have any graph paper to hand so I used an excel spreadsheet – that I realised that I visualise knitting designs the same way that I design soundscapes. Interchangeable blocks that layer and interweave to create something new and unique.)

Having spent the early months of this year clearing out my backlog of podcasts, I was able to justify subscribing to a few new ones and Knitsonik was naturally among the first to be chosen back in March. Why did it take until now for me to work my way through the backlog? Certainly not because the podcast isn’t interesting. It’s not even that the episodes are long, though that does mean I need to carve out time specifically to listen rather than sticking them on in short periods between other things. The problem with the podcast is that it’s…well…too interesting and inspiring. I couldn’t binge listen to it, because I came out of each episode really wanting to go and do some field recordings or make some sound art. Around 50% of my sound recording field trips this year, were as a direct result of listening to this podcast. I’d sit down with a pot of tea and some knitting on a Sunday afternoon intending to have a binge listen and a couple of hours later I’d be standing somewhere unexpected wearing my giant headphones, recording an interesting bird noise or weird echo and wondering vaguely how I’d got there.

I keep forgetting how much listening to other people be passionate about sound design and sound art stirs up my own passion for the work. (You would think that the exponential increase in my sound production work when the hospital radio station I used to volunteer with had an artist in residence would have clued me in but apparently not.) Sound is, in many ways, quite a solitary pursuit. Anti-social even. You spend a lot of time listening really hard to your environment; it’s quite hard to do in company unless you’re working on something that specifically needs another person to achieve. (The idea of embedding sound in a place, or in objects of the place the sound originates from, is increasingly important to me, especially since I relocated to the Highlands.) It is, therefore, quite easy to feel isolated in your work. Especially, if you don’t live in a large metropolis with an established community of sound artists. Even having an outlet like this blog, it can feel a bit like no-one’s listening.

Therefore, it’s been great to have this window into someone else’s sound projects, their passions and quirks, especially that rare confluence of viewing sound design/art as a craft with all that that implies. And oddly comforting to know that someone else finds sheep noises just as compelling and comical as I do.

Perhaps, if this year’s project was to write more about sound, then next year’s project should be to send more sound out into the world. Not just the stuff that I get paid to make, but the little projects that I make just for the joy of making soundscapes too.

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Other Adventures @ The Inverness Film Festival

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documentaries, eden court, iff, sound art

The advantage of a small concentrated film festival like Inverness is that you can get a lot seen in the course of four really intense days. The disadvantage is that if you happen to be away for the weekend of the week that it’s on you’ll will a sizeable percentage of the films. Which is to say that I missed several really interesting looking documentaries due to being in Aberdeen, though my bank balance probably appreciates it. (Hence my lack of nablopomo posting over the weekend, as I was away without the laptop. I did, however, manage to knock out a draft of a short story for a competition I want to enter, which I feel should count for something. The friend I was staying with was fair taken with me actually writing in a paper notebook.) I did manage to see some things, so really there’s no reason to sulk about the things I didn’t see.

Very Semi-Serious

After my earlier fretting about the unlikeness of my chances of getting to my target of 25 feature documentaries this year, I came across my list of new years resolutions and lo and behold my actual target is the much more achievable 15 documentaries. As this film is number 11 for this year, I actually feel hopeful rather than daunted by the task ahead.

Very Semi Serious is a film about the Cartoon department of the New Yorker. It’s a charming little film about the serious business of being funny. More an insight into how being a cartoonist in the 21st century works, and how the publishing industry has changed since the ‘golden era’, than an actual history of the New Yorker. It’s the kind of film I feel ought to make the rounds of art schools for budding cartoonists to watch and get a realistic idea of how hard they’ll have to work to get on in the industry. Interesting and charming and amusing, even if in my case it was more of a wry smile than a guffaw, but then that tends to be my reaction to the cartoons themselves so it seems entirely fitting.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film was that it tackled head on the issue of diversity amongst the cartoonists. It looks at the activities of the current Cartoon Editor to shake submissions up, to find and nurture new talent because in his words

“Unless we interceded this may be the last generation of cartoonists to do this.”

That utterly pragmatic statement as a reason for opening up the submissions process, seems to fit perfectly with what they say they want from their cartoonists. Which is essentially to find cartoonist with distinctive styles and voices. It’s interesting to watch the archive footage of a gathering of the cartoonists in the 70s – essentially a gathering of late middle-aged white guys, with one solitary woman slipping awkwardly through the crowd – and compare it to the current crop with its considerably more diverse mix.

We do get the usual suspects interviews – the legends of the job if you will – but instead of just getting our one trailblazing female cartoonist – Roz Chast – talking about how it used to be and one of the current ones talking about how it is now, several female cartoonists, at different stages in their career with the magazine are interviewed about different things. In fact the interviews with the current batch of cartoonists are pretty much gender balanced. I feel odd bringing it up, but it says something about the documentaries that I’ve watched recently that I felt that there were a lot of women in this documentary when really it was just a proportional number in terms of how many were part of the story. (According to the Variety review there were 45 named contributors of those 15 are women. I’m remembering that Geena Davis article from years back about the 3:1 ratio of men to women in family friends and how that affects the point at which we ‘see’ the balance tip on representation by gender and laughing at myself for proving her point.)

It’s a film largely dominated by the presence of Bob Mankoff – rightly so, he’s an interesting guy with lots of intelligent and interesting things to say about the serious art of being funny – about a very white, male middle class institution, I would not have been surprised, and probably wouldn’t have noticed if Chast had been our only female contributor. It was nice to have variety – a range of cartoonists, a production staffer, Mankoff’s wife and daughter – but kind of sad that it’s unusual enough to be noticeable.

Carnival of Souls

This was a really unusual film event to attend, as there wasn’t actually a film being projected.

It’s a binaural sound experience! Basically they took the script of a 1962 horror movie of the same name and adapted it as an audio drama. Binaural audio, for the uninitiated is essentially where sound is recorded using a set up where the microphones are positioned like your ears (usually using an adapted mannequin head, but you can do it yourself with microphones that sit in your ears like headphones) while the drama unfolds around them. Done well it produces a really immersive experience. In the cinema we wore wireless headphones and blindfolds and dived in. The blurb made a great deal about having tested the drama out on blind film fans to let them tweak it to be more effective. And the soundscape is really effective. Creepy and strange and really evocative. Technically its brilliant, I’m in awe. It’s a shame therefore that the plot of the film itself – especially the ending – makes no sense. Early on it works wonderfully but towards the end of the film it just, doesn’t make sense. Presumably something on screen in the film itself would have made a big reveal but perhaps not. It was really clever and really well done, but I do wish they’d chosen better source material.

As an aside, I think the technique has potential as an interesting way to re-score silent movies. I think it could be really fun to take the script of a silent movie – just because we can’t hear the dialogue, doesn’t mean it wasn’t written – and do the same thing with that and screen the two in sync. Now that would be a 3D cinema experience I could get behind.

Symphonies, Sound Art and Scandinavians @Tectonicsglas

Tags

art exhibits, city halls, sound art, tectonics

Last weekend saw the return to Glasgow of the Tectonics music festival. A joint venture between Iceland and Scotland, the festival has settled into an annual role with two sibling festivals running in Glasgow (in May) and Reykjavik (in April) with artists and orchestras from both countries coming together to provide a strange and often wonderful mix of electronic and symphonic music.

Despite having attended and enjoyed the Glasgow edition last year, I nearly missed this year’s festival. Most of April was lost in a haze of Gàidhlig assignments, and any post that wasn’t of a vital or time sensitive nature got put to one side in the interim. On Saturday I sat down with intent to go through said abandoned post and deal with anything that needed dealt with. I didn’t get very far, as fairly early in the pile I came across a programme for this year’s Tectonics festival and discovered that it was in fact that weekend. So instead I spent time frantically rearranging my schedule to fit in the Sunday programme of the festival. Definitely worth it though.

I think this year’s selection was a little more esoteric than last year, either that or Sundays are reserved for the more Avant-garde side of the festival because there were a couple of acts that were…very Avant-garde (including an act that felt like I could have stumbled on them in one of the odder venues at the Fringe) and I seem to remember picking Saturday over Sunday to attend last year for that reason. Nothing quite blew me away the way the transcendent beauty of Guth na eòin/Voice of the birds by Hanna Tuulikki did last year but then the only live experience I had that improved on that in the entirety of 2013 was Skunk Anansie and I’d wanted to see them live since I was 12…

There were some definite highlights to this year’s festival. The always excellent BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, were on form, making their instruments do strange and wonderful things. At the other end of the scale S.L.Á.T.U.R. (pleasingly, slàtur is apparently the Icelandic equivalent of haggis) a Reykjavik-based collective, composing and creating experimental music with both electronic and analogue (very analogue, during one piece they all played instruments that looked as though they had been made from long, square cardboard tubes) instruments, and performing them with an innovative and entertaining form of animated notation that proved most interesting and amusing. Also it made the audience participation in the last song rather easier to follow and stay in time for. (I was a foot. That’s all I will say on the matter)

Despite their Scandinavian charms, it was the Sound Art performance that stole the show for me. Sarah Kenchington’s installation Sounds from the Farmyard was open all day for concertgoers to play with and on, and it was fabulous. Kenchington creates instruments out of every day and found objects, alongside deconstructed conventional musical instruments, and she brought a selection of her creations from the last ten years for the audience to play with. My personal favourites were a contraption where you rolled large metal ball bearings into a giant metal maze where the motion swung the balls on ever changing paths and chimed bells made out of wine glasses. Also a much smaller contraption seemingly made from some kind of metal tom-tom and a metal slinky, which made a brilliant noise that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a 1950s sci-fi film. On both days of the festival she managed to gather together a collection of musicians and enthusiastic amateurs to perform all the instruments in something like harmony, that managed to show case the charms of each of the instruments. By all rights it should have been the most discordant and weird of the performances, the performers were almost all strangers to each other, they had no real rehearsal time and there didn’t appear to be a central score, yet somehow they created something not only strange and wonderful, but completely musical as well.

Sound Inspirations

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inspiration, sound art, sound design

I wanted to write something about sound that was making me feel inspired at the moment, because, well I’ve not been feeling particularly inspired recently and I need to remind myself of what inspires me and reconnect with it.

People Doing Excellent Work Within the System

I’ve not been to the cinema very often this year, and mostly only to see big blockbuster efforts which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal circumstances to hear good film sound. Everything’s painted in broad brushstrokes, soundscape just as much a characterisation and plot, and in most cinemas the soundtrack will be played Far. Too. Loud. (Turning it up to 11 doesn’t always make it better) Which is why of course I ended up seeing Gravity in 2D at an arts cinema where you can actually find an human being to adjust the sound if its gone wonky.

As any sound geek will tell you (and as the film tells the viewer in its opening moments) due to space being a vacuum its not possible for sound to be heard in space, so following that school of thought almost all the sound we hear in the film is strictly subjective; lots of breathing and radio transmissions. The sound traps us into the suits with the astronauts too, giving us the full claustrophobic experience. The sheer weight of the silence outside their little bubbles is like a physical weight pressing down on them, as relentless as gravity, and the astronauts’ communications, narrating their actions (especially after they lose contact with Earth) and telling each other – and the ether – stories to fight off the silence is a vital part of the film’s atmosphere as well as its soundscape. The way the radio broadcasts act as lifelines just as much as the tethers do, from Matt’s country music and stories told to keep Ryan from passing out as she runs low on Oxygen, to the banter and warnings from mission control (especially the astronauts reporting back to ‘Houston in the blind’ just in case they can be heard back on Earth, to Ryan’s two-way incomprehensible conversation with a Chinese farmer/radio operator, it says a fair bit about the human urge to communicate and reach out to each other even when they don’t/can’t understand and manages to be rather emotive as well. The sound is subtle and rarely foregrounded, the score is barely noticeable – and when it is briefly noticeable it feels grating and wrong – and all the more powerful for that. Less is more after all, but when it needs to be my goodness it packs a punch.

(I knew Glen Freemantle’s name was familiar from somewhere, he’s been sound designer on almost all of Danny Boyle’s films, include Sunshine which has frankly excellent sound – I can’t believe I haven’t written about it before, must remedy that and soon.)

People Being Experimental and Adventurous

Soundry. In their own words, ‘an online creative listening laboratory and magazine…[that]…publish existing work and help artists create new work with the aim of sharing sounds that enrich and transform ways of listening to the noise and silence of everyday life’. Essentially they’re collating all the weird and wonderful sound projects and experiments going on out there that you might otherwise miss. They’re mostly on tumblr, which is a nice change, as it means their posts just show up in the flow of my dashboard when I’ve had a long hard day at work and can’t cope with anything more complex than a flow of pretty pictures but could really use something strange and imaginative to kick me back into gear. (There’s just so much on twitter these days that it’s easy to miss the good stuff)

I first stumbled across them via a posting on, I think, Central Station, calling for submissions to their postcards project. Essentially, you submit a photograph with a minute of sound that captures the atmosphere of the place you took the photo. It’s a really simple idea, but there’s something really evocative about the way the sound postcards capture little moments in time and place. Proper slice of life stuff.

Edinburgh Water of Life. Stumbled across on the Scotland Introducing podcast of all places, its Tommy Perman of FOUND (and weird and wonderful composing efforts for the Riverside museum fame) and singer songwriter Rob St John, recording and sampling the sounds of Edinburgh waterways with underwater microphones combining natural and unnatural sounds and making music with them. If you pop over to their website you can hear some of the source recordings (which are rather fascinating in their own right), some samples of the finished tracks and read all about the research and adventures they had on this arts/science project of theirs. I’ve a deep abiding love of contact microphones but having listened to this I really want to experiment with hydrophone microphones now. I had a pretty good summer this year, but I kind of wish it’d been more like theirs…

Mark’s Sri Lankan adventures. Actually this one needs a bit more explanation. So, I run the Production Team at the radio station based at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Radio Royal. Last year we were lucky enough to have an artist in residence Mark Vernon – well, actually he belonged to the hospital itself but we got to work closely with him. Which led to the Channel 604 project, which in turn really fired up my production team about the potential to do interesting things with sound. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work of the production team, making jingles, promos and adverts, teaching new starts the basics of audio editing, and forget that actually the point of the team is to do ‘different’ stuff. Having Mark around and hearing the positive responses from people to the project (whether as participants or audience members) were a timely reminder that there is in fact an audience for something that wee bit different out there. It made us get out there with our giant headphones and tiny recording devices, interview people and record the world. We made things and tried things and generally got very excited and geeky about sound. But of course things tailed off, the residency finished, deadlines reared their ugly heads and generally we got distracted. But lo, a few weeks ago an email appeared, turns out that Mark’s out in Sri Lanka on residency working on a project for the Colombo Art Biennale next year. He’s sent back a sound diary of his adventures and once again weird, mundane and wonderful sounds are filling the room, snapshots of adventures half the world away. I can feel my inspiration waking up, looking around blearily and fixating on that one patch of blue sky amongst all the heavy grey.

It’s time to stop talking, grab the giant headphones, put fresh batteries in the Roland or the Marantz, get out there and listen.

Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums @Tectonicsglasgow

Tags

art exhibits, city halls, sound art, tectonics

Back in May, I set off on a quest to see an orchestra live in concert and ended up attending a very odd (but very good) music festival involving collaborations between orchestral and electronic musicians and composers. The Glasgow incarnation of the Tectonics festival deserves a piece in its own right, but for now I’ll focus on one particular element in the festival: a sound installation by Alvin Lucier.

The festival stretched over the City Halls and the Old Fruitmarket across the weekend, but this particular piece took up residence in one of the recital rooms all weekend. It was pre-programmed to run at regular intervals throughout the weekend, but I was lucky enough to get to see Alvin Lucier perform it live. Generally when you see sound art, its entirely divorced from its original performance, in most cases pre-recorded and unchanging between repetitions. (Not necessarily a bad thing, and some might even argue that the fixed nature of these pieces is what makes them art installations rather than musical performances.) This on the other hand was far more like a musical performance, the score he was playing from might have been exactly the same but the way he performed it was full of little differences in tones, expression and timing. Sitting on the floor of the room amid dozens of other people squished together cross-legged engaging with or being baffled by the performance in front of us.

Technically Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums (for slow sweep oscillator, loudspeakers, bass drums and suspended Ping-Pong balls) is really just four bass drums being hit by Ping-Pong balls suspended on fishing line, with the vibrations being converted by an attached to sine wave oscillator into very different sounds. However, that really doesn’t do justice to the swooping strangeness of the sounds produced, or the surreal yet whimsical experience of watching it being created. I’m sure there are other ways (easier ways even) to hit the drums in the same manner but something about the Ping-Pong balls hanging from one of the beams on fishing wire, made it seem both tailored to the space it inhabited (as though it had been designed specifically for the space, even though it had not been) and to inject a sense of fun into the whole proceedings.

Equally it was interesting to compare the experience of watching him as a performer in a small space and later seeing one of his lesser known orchestral compositions get the full wide-screen interpretation at the hands of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

This felt very much in sync with the spirit of the wider festival, that all these performances and pieces were both serious, sometimes challenging, works of art and fun experiments that pushed the boundaries of what is possible or practical with the instruments at hand.