Flush

This recording was taken with an omni-directional mic mounted with Blue-Tac to the underside of my parent's toilet cistern lid.

Brecht on radio

"As for the radio's object, I don't think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers."

undrFM presents:

Borderlands, a weekly radio show exploring the outer reaches of recorded sound - experimental music, electro-acoustic composition, phonography and radiophonic art - begins this Tuesday morning at 1am (6am GMT) on CHRY. The centre piece of the inaugural show will be an oft forgotten masterpiece of popular modernism: Glen Gould’s radio documentary The Latecomers.

As the weeks go by I'll be using this blog as a respository and archive for the shows.

‘Sound comes to the rescue of thought…’ But thought must reluctantly return the favour: some more reading notes on Sonic Warfare

At the core of the book lies a univocal ontology that undermines much extant theorising on sound. The principal claim is that all entities are composed of vibration - to not vibrate is to not exist. Stability occurs only at the level of perception, beneath perception, at the molecular and sub molecular level, matter is in constant flux and this flux is rhythmical.

Vibration, rhythm, concepts traditionally associated with the study of sound are here re-purposed and employed in ontological argument. I’m going to concentrate on a specific consequence of this re-deployment namely the repercussions for any metaphysics of sound (understood here as any theory attempting to grasp what those specific, audible vibrations, we call sound are). For Goodman sound is but a thin, audible slice of a much vaster vibrational spectrum and so we’re advised to move beyond theories of sound that place the listening subject at their centre and make human audition critical in theorising sound’s being. A prominent proponent of such phenomenological thinking is Pierre Schaeffer for whom sound’s essence - the sound object - is largely determined by the listening subject. Accordingly it is not what or how a sound sounds but what the subject does to it when listening that determines its essential nature. What sonic idealism fails to account for, in Goodman’s useful neologism, is unsound - those vibrations that lie beyond the threshold of human perception but are none-the-less affective. This poses a significant problem to any theory of sound - are vibrations, felt but not heard, sound? And if so how do we account for it when models of perception cannot?

Goodman’s solution is a non-anthropocentric ecology of affects where one entity (human or otherwise) affects another with its vibration. Internal vibrations, at a singular threshold, spill out into the world and reach other entities. This occurs prior to the division of subject and object and so prior to perception. An example lifted from Brain Massumi’s work on the affective sensorium: a car screeches dangerously towards you and, before you have recognised the sensation as sound, your body leaps out of harm’s way. Here the primary vibration startles and excites before the sound is meaningful. While sympathetic to Goodman’s attempt to problemetize and widen the limits of auditory experience, he is too hasty in the tout court rejection of anthropocentrism. Metaphysics of sound have long placed the human at their centre because sound is in part a human phenomenon. This isn’t to say, with the strict phenomenologists, that listening is essential to the existence of sound, but rather that it is in part a product of a very human relation to vibration. From the perspective of a theory attempting to grasp a human centred phenomena - sound - it seems retrogressive to remove the human subject. This has long been a challenge to any attempt at sonic realism: how do we understand sounds as independent objects (or events) when they are, at least partially, reliant upon human audition for there nature? Goodman’s rejection of anthropocentrism may also be troublesome for his own ecology of affects. Does not unsound have a specifically human quota? Is there not a range, albeit larger than that of audition, within which a vibration can affect the human body? And wouldn’t it be wise to start mapping this?

Another way around the unsound problem is to propose a non-Schaefferian sound object dichotomously composed of sound and unsound. Stretching Goodman’s notion a fair bit, unsound here would designate a sound object`s primary, vibrational qualities. Not just infra and ultra sonics but all transmitted (air bound) vibrations would be unsound. This dimension of the sound object would only be open to mathematical elaboration. Sound for its part would be the result of human interaction with unsound and emergent via affect, perception or an admixture of both.

Borderlands

I've just had word that my proposal for a regular experimental music, sound and radio show - Borderlands - has been approved by the CHRY programming committee. Needless to say, I'm delighted by this and will post more details as and when they emerge.

Scripts for the Pageant Mix

New label Blackest Ever Black have put together a singular mix of the jarring music inspiring their output. In their words:

"This mixtape aims to give some sense of the predilections and prejudices that stirred Blackest Ever Black into being. Most of its content is drawn from the 1980s - not a conscious choice, but rather a natural result of favouring music of real character, imagination and volatility. Music to make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading, and which can be expressed in a single, simple command: you must change your life."

Listen here.

Ways of Listening #1: Reductive Listening (Pierre Schaeffer)

Select a sound, the sound of a cough, a mobile phone text alert, the sound of a single spoken word, any sound. Close your eyes, try to forget that it is the sound of something or that it means something and focus on the sound itself. Become obsessed with the sound, record it, play it back, do it again and again. Change it, use some free audio-edit software from the internet to add effects, reverb, echo and so on. Stretch it, bend it, slow it down, speed it up, make as many changes as you can. Save them. Listen to the modified sound, one file after the other. Maintain focus on the sound and notice invariant qualities existing across the different files. These properties belong to the sound object - the essence of the sound - and you have just listened to it.

That’s not all, the sound object has a strangely mute side. In perceiving the invariant properties of the sound object, in recognising the sound object across a variety of manifestations you have created it. You have given it its unity, the foundation of its earthly subsistence. What began as an eminently realist enterprise, to uncover the essential nature of sound itself, turns out to be idealist. Lesson learnt? You can’t listen to the sonic real? Not quite, only one part is accessible via perception, that part that comes from our (very real) relation to the real sound. The sound object is henceforth split in two: there are the primary (mathematic) properties of frequency, wavelength, amplitude and so on, and their corresponding secondary (sonorous) qualities of pitch, loudness etc that we perceive. Each modification that you made before thus created a new sound object.

If you'd like to read a more detailed account of Schaeffer's reductive listening than this glib outburst take a look at Brian Kane's more scholarly essay.

In the dark

How, using only sound, do you 'reflect the economic and cultural dissonance to be found in an area currently in the throes of a major urban metamorphosis'? Not, as the creators of The Dark Hours (an exhibit at last night's Torontonian Nuit Blanche) disappointingly attempted - with a fifteen-min, absurdly abstract bass drone that eliminated all Parkdale's identity, its historic socio-political specificity.

If you are interested in a politically engaged artistic response to urban gentrification you should check out Laura Oldfield Ford's growing body of extrordinary work.

all ears

From a flyer for a night of techno in Leeds.

Tonight on CHRY

I make my radio debut. I'll be deejaying from 11.00 until 1.00 Eastern time (GMT -5) on York University's CHRY 105.5 FM. I'm providing cover for the Found Sound show whose musical remit is pretty open. My plan, which may change in the intervening hours, is to play a load of ambient - Caretaker, GAS, and a Beckett radio play amongst other stuff suitable for the wee hours.

If you're not in the northern Toronto region and wish to listen you can here or alternatively I'll post a link to a download in the next couple of days.

EDIT

So, I didn't manage to make a satisfactory recording, the show however went pretty well despite my lack of technical skill. Anyway, I'll be back on air next week at the same time.