Chris Watson workshop

Chris Watson was in Edinburgh from the 20th to the 22nd of April 2011 and gave a wonderful workshop in which he was amazingly generous with sharing his tips tricks and techniques on field recording. Having worked for the BBC for years he had brilliant stories and he has been able to develop some really useful and unusual techniques for recording all sorts of things.

I made some parabolic reflectors specially for this workshop and all three were used to excellent effect.


The focus of our activities was to record the dawn chorus in George Square in the centre of Edinburgh, and after a bit of editing we presented our recordings as part of an evenings concert for Martin Parker's Dialogues festival in Inspace.

Chris played a selection of sound recordings and soundscapes through a quadraphonic sound system and I lent him my homemade quadraphonic panner for the gig. He was able to pan the echo-location sounds of Orcas around the audience to create a thrilling underwater soundscape, and the whole range of sounds was absolutely fascinating.

Edison Cylinder Recording Session

Aleks Kolkowski, hardcore phonographer, invited me to his studio on the 6th of April to record two Edison Cylinders as a contribution to his Phonographies project.

For the session I used a homemade circuit based on the STEIM Cracklebox but with three similar circuits all joined together. The 9V battery powers a 12" Celestion G12 speaker and the sound is projected from there straight into the recording horn of the Edison Phonograph.

We recorded two pieces both lasting two minutes (the maximum length for a brown wax cylinder at 160rpm).  The first was fairly straightforward but for the second Aleks experimented with a sound-on-sound technique, actually cutting the groove in two passes.

You can hear the results here.










Photos by Aleks Kolkowski.


www.phonographies.org

trashcomplex.wordpress.com
blog.frieze.com/phonographies

Research Seminar - Liverpool Hope

Robin Hartwell very kindly invited me to give a music research seminar on 2nd of March 2011 at Liverpool Hope University.

The seminar was based on the research presented at the ICMPC in Seattle in 2010 and was entitled:
Noise and Fidelity: Poles Apart? or What we might have lost by getting computers to do things for us.

Robin is an excellent host and  had a great setup of a decent record player and some lovely old speakers - B&W or Altec (I can't quote remember), which sounded lovely and allowed me to play lots of records in an appropriate setting.

Philip Thomas Workshop

I organised a two day workshop by the pianist Philip Thomas on 24-25th February 2011, based on the music of Christian Wolff. We also had a masterclass for composer's for piano, and it was a great pleasure to be able to invite Philip to Edinburgh after first meeting him at the ICMSN in Keele in 2009.

Sound Thought, Glasgow

On the 4th of February 2011 I was due to perform a new piece Testing, Testing for three record players and ring modulators in the Arches in Glasgow as part of the Sound Thought festival. Unfortunately I had to cancel due to ill health which was a great smae as the rest of the bill looked really good. I had played the piece in Edinburgh in 2010 and was looking forward to taking to a new city.

Voice On Record - Final Show

I finished my 58th and final show of my Voice On Record radio programme on 20th December. This was a one hour show for Resonance FM broadcast every week on Tuesday evenings, repeated on Sundays featuring a wide selection of spoken word recordings from my collection.

Each week would have a theme and through the almost 18 months the show was running, I played recordings of people like William Faulkner, Buckminster Fuller, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Aldous Huxley, John Arlott, Richard Burton, James Joyce, Bela Lugosi, and many other not so famous individuals with interesting voices or stories.

The shows are possibly still available to download from Resonance FM.


The full details including playlists and pictures of the records are available on the Voice On Record blog.

Art Of Record Production Conference 2010

3-5th December 2010 was the ARP conference at Leeds Metropolitan University where I presented a paper entitled - Tubby's Dub Style: The live art of record production. There was a great range of papers and some very interesting speakers including Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), Paul Harkins (Edinburgh, Napier) and an excellent keynote by Steve Albini.

ARP 2010