Bandcamp Album

This small collection is formed from sonic frequencies that have become perceptible to human ears through technological listening devices and gadgets that reveal the secret sounds of everyday realms.

glitchy bat mix and DÉRIVE are the results of walking and listening journeys through familiar places where sonic material has been foraged, assembled and reworked via bat detectors and electromagnetic sensors. radioNormal was made by feeling around world via short-wave radio tentacles.
baRdo summons a particular time and place through a device that listens to light.

The tracks have been assembled through playful, aleatoric and divinatory processes of scrying, imbricating, distilling and atomising sound. They were made at different times, but they seem to belong together. I repurpose the textural qualities of these works in my live and improvised work and my compositions. They are on-goingly re-encountered and remade. Nothing is wasted - or finished.

radioNormal:
is made from the static and signal of short-wave radio.
I find there is an utter magic to listening through soft enveloping oceans of radio static, allowing my ears to drift through soft noise and tantalising ghosts of stations.
This track is a record of my first adventure into what I have come to call radio scrying, an ongoing field-recording and deep-listening practice which features in my sonic work.
My friend introduced me to the web sdr online radio http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 and I improvised this piece by live-processing audio recordings I recorded from the site, attempting to feel and shape different waves of intensity.
It may be called static, but it isn’t ever still.

glitchy bat mix:
Bat detectors are listening devices that make bat calls audible. They enable us to perceive a secret, more-than-human sonic world that is hidden from our ears. I recorded the audio from my friend’s bat detector as we wandered around at dusk by a barn and nearby railway bridge near Aylsham, Norfolk.
While things seemed peaceful and quiet in the human sonic realm, excited flurries of expressive intensity were rising and falling in the bat world. It was magical being in two worlds at once.
I later layered, glitched and granulated the recordings into this audio composition, I on-goingly use it in live improvisations and as a textural element to other compositions.

DÉRIVE:
This piece emerged from an electromagnetic dérive – a drifting directionless amble through the city of Norwich made with a Soma Ether a wide band radio device that is able to perceive electromagnetic landscapes, a hidden word made tangible through both magnetic and electric sensors. The device can use bodies – such as people and lampposts as conductive antennas.
My friends and I spent an afternoon wandering by river and back street, recording, drawing, drifting.
I have re-worked the electromagnetic audio, layering, glitching, granulating and pitch shifting in real-time improvisation playing the audio as an instrument. The rhythmic pulse that features throughout the work is the sound of Greggs the Baker in Anglia Square where we stopped for pie and tea.

baRdo:
This track seems to contain and evoke the feeling, time and place of its creation. It’s the sound of led lights recorded between Christmas and new year 2024. I was by the sea, and a thick, still mist had enveloped everything. There was an eery stillness, a between time, a bardo that lasted for several days.
I recorded the sound of the fairy lights using a ‘photon smasher’ by Clip [https://www.clipsoundandmusic.uk/photonsmasher/]. The device uses a solar cell to turn light into sound, it listens to infrared and visible light wavelengths. I fed the photon smasher audio through a wingie resonator and recorded this piece as I stared out of the window into the mist. The wingie is a mystifying device, that playfully augments sound frequencies.
[https://www.mengqimusic.com/wingie2-introduction]

Thanks to:
gem ash and Rachel Wright who are both baked into these works.
credits

bandcamp