sonic ghosts
august 25, 2004.
Five of my Sound Chronicles montages are included in the third Sonic Ghosts programme, alongside works by Nicholas Virgo, Mhairi Macfarlane & Andrew McKee, Pippa Murphy, Pete Stollery and Alistair MacDonald. The third edition of Sonic Ghosts is this week's 'live (mp3) transmission' at New Media Scotland's DRIFT Radio. Sonic Ghosts ("reconstructing and processing moments in time and space, events now gone, and found sound atmospheres") is one of the three 'themes' in Resonant Cities, a series of radio programmes curated by Robert H. King
Drift, "an exploration of sound art and experimental music featuring radio broadcasts, moving image, publications, and live events", is taking place throughout 2004. The project's web site gives access to a large archive of well-documented Drift-transmissions, freely available upon registration.
[ added april 04, 2008 ] From the contributions
that he originally selected for Resonant Cities, curator Robert King made a
second selection, "exemplifying the range of material that was initially
available on the streaming broadcasts", to fit onto two audio CDs.
It took quite a while for this 'Resonant Cities' document to appear (it
is dated july 2007). It took so long that in fact I had more or less forgotten
about it. Therefore it was a pleasant surprise when - as if out
of the blue - a package from Scotland arrived with my 'artist copies'. (But
also that as a matter of fact is several months ago now.)
It has been worth the wait, though. The two CDs come together with a 24-page
booklet with detailed information on the artists and their contributed tracks,
a descriptive selection of a number of web sites and resources relevant
to sound art, field recording, phonography, sonic intervention and radio
art, and a short essay by Robert King on the project, in which he nicely recounts the personal 'sound
memories' that led him to pick the three themes for the broadcasts: Sonic
Ghosts, The Narrative Journey and The Remembered Journey.
On the two CDs there are seventeen tracks, by seventeen contributors from
all over the globe: Claudio Yituey Chea, Mario Mota Martinez, Ed Osborn,
Aaron Ximm, Erdem Helvacioglu, John Levack Drever, Pippa Murphy, Pete Stollery,
Thanos Chrysakis, Roger Mills, Viv Corringham, Charlie Pulford, Michael
McLoughlin, Nicholas Economos, Lorenza Lucchi Basili, Adrian Newton and
myself (with the Sound Chronicles track 'GrandTirage').
Together the seventeen tracks make for a great pattern book of sonic explorations of our 'fragmented city soundscapes', involving a wide range of approaches to recording and composition with field recordings.
The first time I listened to 'Resonant Cities', one of my 'immediate favorites'
was Aaron Ximm's contribution,
the very 'musical' Buriganga Canon, which also struck me as being
strangely familiar. Of course I had heard it before, in the Drift web stream;
but I also had heard there all the other contributions, so that could not
account for the evident 'resonance' I experienced when re-hearing Aaron's
piece ... 
The
track is constructed by layering copies of a single recording he made from
a row boat on the Buriganga River in central Dhaka (Bangladesh), featuring
the sound of diesel boat motors and horns. It later occurred to me how similar
the sound of Buriganga Canon is to that of a track I did a really
long time ago (London, 1981), and in which I layered a recording of a metal
humming top. The fast turning of the top comes with a 'clicking'
sound that is just like the sound of the diesel boat motors in Aaron's track,
and the top's humming sounds a lot like the horns ... So that had been the
reason for the immediate attraction that I felt for the Buriganga Canon.
The sounds of boats on the Bangladesh river conjured up a sonic ghost,
and unconsciously took me back to a Bayswater room in the London of the
early 1980s, where one day I sat on the floor and played with a humming
top ...
[ I actually do not know whether the Resonant Cities double CD + booklet can be bought and/or ordered somewhere. The New Media Scotland website only mentions the production of a 'Drift companion CD', but gives no further information. I still have a number of nicely packaged 'n' sealed copies though, so if you are interested in obtaining 'Resonant Cities', do drop me a line ... Aaron Ximm's track Buriganga Canon is, btw, available as a free download on his compilations-page. ]
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