acoustic guitars in made up tunings. the quiet between quiets. overthinking/underthinking. tape hiss/memory's static.
Came across THIS BLOG POST via the Brother Cycles blog and although, on the face of it, it is a post about an extreme of cycling, the beauty of cycling is that you taste a little bit of this every time you get on a bike. That’s why bikes are magic.
You should most definitely read it.
I’ve just come back from a week away on the North Norfolk coast, a place very close to my heart. Whilst there, I found myself thinking a lot about permanence and ephemerality in the things we make – be that art, architecture, even communities. When you’re in a landscape that changes twice a day, where certain spaces only exist at the discretion of the tides and you see it’s effect on everything, I don’t think you can help but think about it.
On coming back home, I was glad to see and hear La Cosa Preziosa ( Susanna Caprara ) latest minature kind of touch upon this.
You should totally check her Soundcloud out and follow her on Twitter too.
I’m playing the Leicester Fringe Festival Thursday 16th August at The Cookie Jar in Leicester. Better still, one of my most favouritist singers is playing – the wonderful Natalie Squance.
On the morning of the Monday 25th June just gone, I was walking along the beach of Charlestown, Cornwall. Working along the small bank made by the tide heaping up the washed and rubbed stones of pebbles and sand. As I went further away from the harbour wall, the sounds changed. Along side the waves came the sounds of birds from the cliff. The wave sound became softer, the displaced pebbles from my footsteps more pronounced. I picked up two flat pieces of clay and struck them together but you couldn’t hear them at all.
The following morning, back at home in Leicester, I was hanging out the washing, 0645, in the morning sun. Garden birds, the hum of traffic from the motorway carried on the faint breeze, me dropping clothes pegs. A different sound all around but just as vivid as the morning before.
Later that evening, I sat in a room rubbing two stones that I’d collected on the beach that previous morning together and listened to how the sound moved around the room. Which obviously lead me to Akio Suzuki.
I could see it glistening on the dirty grass of the kerb as I looked from the window. I knew straight away what it was. I wondered how it got there as I walked across to see it closer. This used to be a much more common site.
Spun out reel.
A thin line of shiny brown tape leading to a messy tangle.
A shivering cluster.
On these squiggly lines is a message, a message I can hear just by piecing it back together. It will play, it will make some sort of sense because this isn’t a collection of invisible numbers. This is sound held on by the particles of it’s being.
It’s real.
It’s no secret that I, like many, miss the ‘objectness’ of hard format releases – the sleeve, the notes, the pictures, the format itself (I’ve never truly got into CDs), the everything . As we go more and more digital, trying to make up this gap – and it is a gap – is something I often think about. So I was pleased to read about the latest 12k releasse from Simon Scott. ‘Below Sea Level‘ comes in a variety options but the thing that makes it interesting for me is the option of being able to buy the download and a book.
Then there is this release from Celer and Machinefabriek. Again, my love of postcards is pulled upon here and it’s a particular idea I’ve had myself for a while but I love the way this has been put together. You can buy from Machinefabriek’s Bandcamp site here – Machinefabriek Bandcamp
One of the best things about making and doing art is making connections with people. It’s especially nice when one of those connections leads to something entirely different. Sir Magpie, the working name of Ana Stefaniak, has used my song Sing to Me (from Humming New Time) for her graduation animation. I really like the dreamy elements of her work so am chuffed to bits she chose some of my work to accompany this. Be sure to visit her site to see more of it.
When I think about it, I’m sure I knew that dusk is a great time to go out for a walk, to look around you. I can recall quite readily walking at this time in rural Kent, gazing across the fields. I have plenty of memories of walking at dusk in Norfolk – going out across the marshes to record the birds; sitting on the jetty watching the tide come in and the channel swell as the sun disappears in Wells next the Sea. I’m just not sure I ever noticed it where I live until this week. I was walking up to the school. The sky was doing that subtle shift in colours where, looking up and then down, it goes from a deep blue to this indescribable orangey-browney-yellowy sunset that you know will soon be gone. All the trees on the horizon stark and black then barely visible at all. The shining silver of Jupiter slowly becomes brighter. Then, the sky becomes night.
Still trying to record. Still nothing concrete to show. Recording a conventional song has proved to be really difficult. But I still can’t quite let it go……
peter wyeth 