Alone in the Trees

Tags

nablopomo, sound art, sound design, sound recording, soundscapes

During the summer, I stumbled across a call for contributors, for a sound art project that would be part of the Sanctuary Labs festival that takes place in the Galloway Forest Dark Skies Park each September. Sound artist Claire Archibald was looking for female audio contributors to share their memories/thoughts/emotional responses to the idea of being a woman alone in the woods and thereby create site specific installation that would be a ‘lone woman wood’ for festival goers to experience. Having grown up in a house surrounded by a small wood, the project immediately caught my imagination.

The project call out had a variety of prompts to get potential contributors thinking about the project’s areas of interest. One of the prompts involved pieces of music or field recordings, and I was reminded that I made a variety of field recordings in various woodlands over the pandemic. I’ve talked before about my adventures recording at the Merkinch Nature Reserve and down by the canal and used many of my recordings on the Ness Islands in my Out of Doors Soundscape last year. However, they weren’t the only woodland recordings. Back in April when only essential travel was allowed, I found myself in Portree for work, and took great pleasure in gathering some early morning field recordings, including in the little wood above the bay and behind the hospital. (There was a path, up the side of the hill into the trees, with a bi-lingual sign: how could I resist?) But the recordings that came immediately to mind were ones I made before that when we still couldn’t go anywhere at all, and my regular walks around Inverness, uncovered a pocket woodland just off an otherwise suburban street. Aultnaskiach Dell is a pocket wood, a rare urban community buyout, and the unusual geography of the place means that as soon as you get into the Dell proper, all sounds of the outside world disappear. As though you’ve stepped through a portal into a rather more rural area, or in my case, it felt like I stepped through a portal in time and space, back into the woods of my childhood. The perfect place for a bit of forest bathing, if that’s your thing. Even just listening back to the recordings I took that first day is transporting and soothing, like being wrapped briefly in a bit of another, safer, simpler, time and place. I knew they were the perfect recordings to accompany my forest thoughts.

Even after having filmed a short horror film in a forest as a student, I’m still less unnerved by the thought of being alone in a forest than many other people I know, regardless of gender. (As I write this it occurs to me that that is not the only time I’ve worked on a film in the forest. When I was still freelancing a few years ago, I did a short stint working on the kids show Raven in the woods near Lagganlia in the Caingorms.) After all, to me, the real fear is not that you’re alone in the woods – it’s that you’re not alone in the woods.

In the end they received 140 submissions across 11 different languages. Enough that each of the 17 trees that they were using as anchors could play a different loop of sounds, so that no two wanders through that wood would be the same, with the sounds combining, collaborating or clashing in different ways depending on the route the visitor took or the time of day they visited. Although I knew from the start that with the festival taking place at almost exactly the opposite end of the country from me, I was unlikely to be able to attend, and even if I were the chances of hearing my piece in situ during the short window I would have been able to be in the actual location, I was still a little sad to have to miss out on experiencing it first hand. The little snippets I got to experience second hand through social media, only succeeding in leaving me wanting more.

lostpenguin · Lone Trees

An Out of Doors Soundscape

Tags

sound art, sound recording, soundscapes

In the early days of lockdown, far enough in that it was obvious this wasn’t going to be a couple of weeks of strangeness but early enough that the novelty hadn’t yet worn off, I started making sound recordings. I think, initially I was intending to contribute them to Cities and Memories lockdown sounds or perhaps make some kind of sound walk installation with them but as time went on and I gradually collected more and more sounds, it became clear that I while I definitely wanted to make some art with them, I needed a bigger canvas for them. I needed a focal point, something to hang a piece on and do the wealth of material justice.

In July, Radio 3 put out a call for proposals for their Slow Radio strand, and one of the producers at work thought of me and my sound recordings and sent it on to me. Between us we put together a pitch – a new experience for me, as for most of the last decade I’ve generally been handed a brief and been expected to fulfil it – and submitted it off to them. This led to some rather entertaining socially distanced location recording adventures – the kind of location sound recording that I normally do is a rather solitary affair which was definitely a contributing factor to why I got so much of it done in lockdown – as my producer had come across some excellent sounds that he thought would add to my soundscape, and we got to re-negotiate how to work together on this sort of thing, within the somewhat safer space of the great outdoors.

Although we were ultimately unsuccessful in our pitching to Radio 3, we did succeed in interesting a Radio Scotland producer – who was also pitching – and so I ended up making a mini version of the programme for Out of Doors. It’s been ages since I made a soundscape that’s needed to stand alone but also told a story rather than being abstract. It was initially intended to have far less voiceover than it ultimately ended up with. I wrote the script to get the story of the piece straight in my head and essentially act as a guide track for me to edit around, but somewhere along the way I rediscovered my radio voice and a surprising amount of voice over made the final cut. Albeit after a fair amount of it had been rewritten and condensed and I definitely had to have a word with myself about killing my darlings. Having mostly worked in news over the last six years, it felt strangely decadent to have the luxury of time to work on a project, leave it to rest for a bit and then make more changes with fresh ears, rather than working against the clock. It was strangely thrilling to hear my own voice on the radio for the first time in years.

lostpenguin · Lockdown Soundscape

After that success my producer buddy casually suggested that I should translate my script into Gaelic and re-record it so that we could use that to pitch our original idea to Radio Nan Gaidheal. As the original programme proposal focused on my other lockdown project – attempting to upgrade my Gaelic from intermediate level where it has plateaued these last few years – it seemed a fitting way to quantify my progress, with a proper translation and something ‘real’ to work towards. I expected the translation part to be the difficult bit – usually if I’m writing something in Gaelic I’m just, writing it in Gaelic rather than translating from English so I’m leaning more on vocabulary and turns of phrase that I’m familiar with and comfortable using. This was very different; a challenge but a good one, and one that I could easily get help and feedback on from fluent colleagues. The difficult bit was reading it aloud. One of the things about learning a language as an adult is that you don’t learn to read the same way as you would as a child. You learn to read in the sense that you can read words and understand what they mean, but you do very little reading aloud. You read aloud sentences you wrote and get your pronunciation corrected but you don’t start with first principals and phonetics, so you don’t really acquire an instinctive understanding of how sounds fit together in words. Which means that often I can pronounce all the words in an individual sentence perfectly well but stringing them together is a different matter entirely.

The other challenge that I kept running up against is that I don’t have a ‘radio voice’ in Gaelic. I’ve had feedback and tutoring from various colleagues who all say I’m ‘almost there’ both in terms of pronunciation and radio voice – apparently I slip into and out of it as I go, and I know what they mean. I suspect it would be less frustrating if my Gaelic radio voice was further away? If I listened back to recordings and thought it was terrible, or that it had potential but not yet, I could just ask someone else to voice it and that would be that. That state of almost but not quite there is deeply frustrating. (It feels a bit metaphorical for my level of Gaelic fluency too.) I’m trying not to be too hard on myself, as it took months of being a radio trainee, doing two hours a week of talking on the radio to find my voice in English and I definitely don’t get that much solid time speaking Gaelic every week, let alone speaking it into a microphone.

So that’s where that project is at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have a Gaelic version to share reasonably early in the new year but for the moment I’m focusing I can make the soundscape itself reflect the same core truths in a different way.

Waterscape @CircusArtspace

Tags

boats, inspiration, inverness, nablopomo, nature, sound art, water

I started writing this art exhibition review, the weekend after I saw it, when the official advice was to avoid pubs, clubs and concerts, anywhere with more than 500 people or that was confined and busy. (The Highlands had yet to have it’s first confirmed case of coronavirus.) An art exhibition, mid-week and off the beaten track seemed an ideal way to spend the afternoon on my day off – there was in fact, just me and the exhibition invigilator for my whole visit. By the Monday everything had changed and it felt weird writing this article. The exhibition itself had been wrapped up early. But part of why I went in the first place was because it might be a while before I could see another art installation and I was correct about that. This exhibition was definitely worth seeing and though circumstances cut it’s already short run down even further, it’s worth remembering.

For obvious reasons, I have fairly high standards when it comes to sound art installations. I get to see them so rarely and the subsequently high expectations mean that I’m all the more disappointed when the art turns out to be disappointing. For a while, a few years back, the best I could often hope for would be that the installation would be so rubbish that I would be so annoyed that I’d be inspired to make my own sound art in grumpy response.

Sometimes though, I come across a sound installation that is so good it inspires me for the opposite reason. Nicola Gear’s contribution to the Waterscape exhibition is definitely in the latter category. It’s an installation in the two parts. The first one Weather is around sixteen minutes long, broken into five movements (glacial melt, storm, shore, garden and pub) played over speakers in the exhibition space. The second part was installed on little portable MP3 players, with headphones so that you could listen just to it or to both pieces at once. The two pieces run in tandem to each other, you can stop and start the one on the player whenever you like and really play around with how the two of them interact with each other, moving yourself around the room, standing up or sitting down – I was alone in the space so I even tried lying on the floor, pretending I was in one of Marco Dessado’s boats on a loch somewhere – to really get the most out of the experience. If all art is changed by it’s interaction with the viewer, then it was true of this exhibit more than most.

If you get the chance, I highly recommend sitting on the floor between the two boats that make up the main part of Marco Dessado’s part of the exhibition, and listening to the headphones on one ear and the speakers with the other ear. The two parts of Gear’s installation interact in new and different ways on each loop. In the low slanting winter light, with the boats hanging close by at head height, you begin to feel almost underwater. Just lovely.

Waterscape ran at Circus Artspace @ Inverness Creative Academy from March 11th to March 18th – it continues, partially, online.

Waterscape Exhibition

Virtual @Tectonicsglas Festival

Tags

art exhibits, city halls, sound art, tectonics, virtual festivals

This weekend is Tectonics weekend.

It’s not as though I manage to attend every year, or even most years, and generally I can’t make the whole thing so end up doing only the Saturday or only the Sunday. Nonetheless, I was originally supposed to be off this weekend and I’d vaguely planned on taking the long weekend and heading to Glasgow to attend. Then of course, everything changed in March and all those plans went to dust.

In common with many other small festivals, Tectonics has made a valiant attempt at creating a virtual festival over the course of it’s scheduled weekend. Unlike many other small music festivals, because the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is involved, most of the proceedings are recorded for Radio 3 and some of the performances even get filmed, so we aren’t talking a shoogly Youtube playlist with lots of unwanted feedback and peaking. All the strange noises are intentional strange noises!

In a nice touch, they’d laid out the virtual programme in the same style and structure as the actual festival programme normally takes, with artist talks and interviews – some archive and others clearly recorded on Zoom specifically for this event – early in each day, alternating concerts between the intertwining strands that would normally take place in the Fruit Market and the City Halls, with set piece concerts later and late night experimental DJ sets to finish it off. Giving the whole thing a feel of a fantasy line-up rather than an apology.

(To add to the verisimilitude of my own experience, I only discovered that the virtual festival was happening, a few days before, after spotting a stray post on twitter.)

One of the available gigs is Syzygys from 2018, which I actually saw live at the Fruit Market and were the highlight of that year’s Tectonics for me – the kind of gig that if you have to leave before the encore, makes you seriously contemplate missing your last train home just to hear one more song. They make such strange and wonderful experimental music, with such confidence and competence. However off the wall the results, it’s never random, the music has a clear internal logic that I appreciate – I find both serialism and minimalism compelling rather than cold when it comes to modern classical music – and there were definitely elements that were pleasingly reminiscent of the medieval end of Western Early music, along with some rather more learning toward the Middle East. Such a pleasure to hear their set again.

I was particularly delighted to see that the sound installations got their moment in the sun too, with extracts from Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums and Sounds from the Farmyard both of which I’ve written about previously – in fact at the start of the clip of the latter, the more eagle-eyed of you may spot me in the audience!

Prepare to be amazed at what you can do with a ping-pong ball. Relive Alvin Lucier's installation from 2013, Sarah Kenchington's musical inventions, and Lucie Vítková's make-up scores from 2019. #tectonicsrewindhttps://t.co/xMc2YGThCq

— Tectonics Glasgow (@tectonicsglas) May 3, 2020

The whole programme has been a delightful companion this weekend, whether I’ve been actively watching concerts in the evenings, or letting the audio only recordings run in the background while I’ve been working from home. All the clips are available for the next 30 days, so if you didn’t get a chance to watch the festival as it unfolded over the weekend, you’ve plenty of time to enjoy something charming, challenging and occasionally baffling, in the coming weeks.

I Heart Hydrophones

Tags

hydrophones, microphones, sound art, strange sound design

Ever since I first had access to the internet, one of the great pleasures that it’s had to offer me, is the ability to accidentally stumble upon utterly fascinating discoveries that you never knew you were interested in. Despite the seemingly unstoppable rise of the algorithms that seek to give us ever more ‘accurate’ search results, it remains possible make these strange discoveries and fallen fascinating tangents. Like most things in life, sometimes you want to keep to the beaten track and other times you want to grab a map, a head-torch, and go spelunking.

When I was a student wiki-walking was a known phenomenon (XKCD have an illustrative strip on this) and a colleague of mine will often start watching a technology demo on youtube and fall down a rabbit hole that could end up with him watching the latest discoveries from NASA’s probes or learning how to make ASMR videos. Another friend of mine calls it falling down a hole in the internet. (And now we’re back to spelunking.) Personally, I tend to find myself listening to oral histories recorded in the middle of the Navajo dessert in the 1960s or reading up on how to build my own hydrophone. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve fallen asleep listening to location recordings from Sri Lanka or had to give myself a stern talking to about how much I don’t need an Otamatone.

Some discoveries prove to be only passing distractions, but others I come back to over and over again. Hydrophones, are definitely one of the latter.

My real interest in hydrophones, started in a somewhat unexpected location. It was a bright, brisk September day in which I was attempting to finally fulfil and completely different notion. Several years previously I’d read an interesting article on repurposed lighthouses and developed a hankering to go to the top of one. The quest seemingly growing in significance and importance – as these things tend to – the more I was thwarted in my attempts to carry it out. On the day in question, I’d spotted a chance to finally succeed – Cromarty Lighthouse was included in that year’s Doors Open Day events. Cromarty Lighthouse, is actually a retired lighthouse – and is now properly known as the Lighthouse Field Station, a part of Aberdeen University’s School of Biology.

The lighthouse itself is of the short squat kind that mark harbours rather the tall sentinel variety that mark lonely outcrops, which in practical terms means that only a limited number of people can climb its tower at any one time, so they had an exhibition in the base of the tower for those of us waiting. As part of their research, floating in the Moray Firth are a small number of hydrophones, recording the sounds – both natural and industrial – of the Firth for the purpose of passive acoustics analysis. (Some of the research station’s specialisms include the impact of marine noise pollution – from oil drilling, to marine renewables to ferries – on marine wildlife.) They had a variety of recordings and a kid-friendly game set up where you matched the recordings to their sources.

It turns out that there’s a world of difference between knowing, logically, that sound travels differently through water, so the underwater soundscape will inevitably be completely different, and putting on the giant headphones and immersing yourself in that other world while standing on dry land. Even better, they’d not long since had an artist in residence in working with some of the recordings which in turn lead down it’s own strange and wonderful rabbit hole.

I suspect I love hydrophones for the same reason that I love contact microphones, because they open up a whole other dimension in sound. Listening to the world through either of these type of microphones makes it explicit and undeniable how rich and complex the soundscape of our world truly is, and how much of it we ignore in day to day life.

Remixing Riga

Tags

cities & memories, remix, sound art, sound design

Earlier this year I made – and contributed – my first remix for the Cities and Memories project. Having successfully completed one remix I was keen to try to some more. But it’s been a busy old year for me professionally, so even once I’d gathered a new collection of field recordings in Riga and Helsinki in June, it was a while before I had the time to sit down and experiment with them. That is something I’ve found that I need a lot of when I’m remixing a sound, I need a lot of time. Once the idea hits me then the actual execution of the idea doesn’t necessarily take a long time – a couple of hours over a couple of days – but I definitely need time to sit with the recordings, to listen back to them in different ways until they’ve become familiar and slide back out the other side into strange again. Also I feel that this particular remix benefitted from being left to rest for a while – I built the core of the remix in mid-September, then left it to sit for a good fortnight, before coming back to it fresh and being able to see what needed done to make it better. At this stage in my ‘learning to remix’ process, I definitely cannot work to a deadline, perhaps that will come in time, but for the moment nothing shuts down the creative processes more conclusively. However, I have enough deadlines at my day job so I’ll try not to worry about applying them the art I make for fun and the challenge.

As I noted in the blurb I wrote for the website, the original recording was made either standing in front on the National Theatre or on the traffic island in front of it. (I took recordings of the trams from both places, but by the time I came to edit the recordings I’d forgotten which were which.) The original recording felt quite prosaic and ordinary, but I was playing around with reverbs and another of my recordings from Riga to create different effects and thought I’d try it on the Tram recording too and ended up with something that sounded like a ghost tram. There’s a lot of history in Riga, the obvious older history on the surface, and the more recent history lurking just below the surface. It felt like the tram had just rumbled out of the past and if I dared to get on it, it might take me off to another time entirely.

I tried to be a bit more adventurous with this remix, then I was with my first remix, so this one went through a couple of iterations before I settled on the one that I submitted. As I learn how to make these remixes, I’m trying to push myself a bit further each time. First time out I just experimented with layering sounds to create a realistic, although entirely imagined soundscape. This time round I built a more illusory soundscape, experimenting with both reverbs and loops to create something where the strangeness hopefully sneaks up on you. It’s also somewhat longer, both than the previous remix and than it’s original recording, which was a little bit daunting at first, but has also left me feeling like I have a better idea of how to push the envelope even further next time.

Sounds of the City Part 2 – The Cities & Memories Remix

Tags

cities & memories, sound art, sound design

For a couple of years now, I’ve been watching with interest as the Cities and Memories project has expanded in scope and public awareness. I also joined their mailing list a while back and have been enjoying poking through the sounds that they’ve been looking for people to remix. But until now I haven’t actually taken part in any of their projects. There are some brilliant and clever remixes and re-imaginings up on the site and I decided that I ought to have a practice with my own sounds before I experimented with the sounds of anyone else. As much as they insist that there’s really no wrong way to tackle the re-imaging of the sounds, I’ve never done any remixing in the conventional sense before, so throwing myself head first into a collaborative project seemed a bit too much like running before I could walk.

I decided, for this first re-imagining, to start with what I know best. As a sound designer, the bread and butter of my work is taking sounds recorded on location, in the foley studio and out of the archive and putting them together to create a sonic landscape that is entirely constructed but that feels believable as the soundscape of the location. I would start with a single field recording (in this case the sound of the fountain outside St Mattius church in Budapest) from a place, and combine it with other sounds recorded nearby to create a soundscape that was entirely imagined and yet was true to the spirit of my memory of the place.

Back in July I posted about the location recordings I made in Budapest when I was there in the summer. I have a whole collection of recordings that I made while I was there, that were collected not for any particular project but instead just for the fun of recording sounds in an unfamiliar place. Each recording paints a picture in my mind with an aural photograph, reminding me of how I felt and what I experienced when I was making the recording.

The soundscape of this reimagined sound is entirely imagined. For one thing, two of the recordings that make it up were made in Pest and the other two were made in Buda, but that seemed an entirely fitting combination to reflect the way the twin cities combine to create a greater whole.

Having made this first foray into re-imagining sounds, I’m itching to do more, to try something more adventurous and experimental. I’ve got the seeds of an idea germinating at the back of my mind, and I’m looking forward to see what sprouts in the coming weeks.

It’s Got Knitsonik On It

Tags

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.

Other Adventures @ The Inverness Film Festival

Tags

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 miss 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 films 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

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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.