Art

Mycelium Manifestation – a circle for Aberetwm

/ Jacob Whittaker / Leave a comment

A 6hr performance/sound installation as part of Aberystwyth Arts Centre’s 50th birthday celebration.
We will be in the Arts Centre theatre from 12pm – 6pm on Monday 8th May.

Mycelium Manifestation
Sounds of Penglais emerge from the sea.
Local voices resonate and repeat creating new forests of potential where past and future coincide.
Fragments of the past loop, crackle, hiss and drone from a collection of audio equipment, old record players and vinyl records.

A curious figure (created by Dominic Saha) investigates how nature can adopt its persona by abstracting the sentient qualities found in fungus. He will inhabit the character of Mushroom Man, the protector of curious giant seed pods whose mysterious presence is amplified and animated by the shifting sound score transforming the ritual caretaking into something otherworldly that conveys a converging of something both ancient and futuristic.

Whittaker & friends will manifest to channel the spirit of the mycelium connecting the trees, embracing Venus to explore and connect with the spring energy of Taurus to create a ritualistic soundscape for modern times.
Old and new combine to explore memory, music, repetition, ritual and function.

You are invited to join us in a ritual sound making experiment.
Contribute and connect with voice and vinyl records to conjure a new lost forest world made from symbols of the past to connect with the future.

A Forest of Words – Find out your celtic zodiac tree and record your tree name to help grow a forest, who knows maybe we’ll summon some Dryads

Vinyl Mycelium – Browse a collection of vinyl connected to Aberystwyth and select tracks for the mix. From Datblygu to George Melly, to Cor Meibion Aberystwyth via Laurie Anderson to The Sound of Music and Cor Cantre Gwaelod, the connections are there to be discovered.

the fourth circle in Taurus – Beltane

/ Jacob Whittaker / Leave a comment

Improvised audio visuals with J&K Hodges on #turntables #pedals #MakeNoise #blackandgold #Strega #0Coast #0Ctrl #live #vj #analog #circles #circuitbent #tree #mayday #ritual #cragenbeca

The fourth circle at Beltane with friends Ceri, Elsa and Kathryn.
I previously wrote about my plans for the fourth circle here.

Visual earth symbols for this session are almost exclusively derived from video clips of the trees of the Ogham Tree alphabet which I have been collecting as part of a new work for ‘Aberetwm’ at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on May 8th.

The birthcharts in the video are mine and Jay and Keryl’s. There’s also one drawn up from the date, time and place of our first play together on Youtube on March 22nd last year.

We were also celebrating the anniversary of the wonderful Cragen Beca parade in Carmarthen on Mayday 2022. An amazing project with public art parade event by Kathryn Campbell Dodd that we were all involved with in some way! Cragen Beca was a conch shell blown by the leader of the ‘Rebecca ‘Merched Beca’ protestors in the 19th century (without them you’d probably be paying tolls on all the roads!). For Kathryn’s project and for this fourth circle celebration of it’s anniversary event artist Ceri Owen Jones sounded a conch, each in a very different way. (Read more about Cragen Beca)

This year the sounds went into some Make Noise modules and bounced around to become some of what you hear in this.

The Fourth Circle

/ Jacob Whittaker / 2 Comments

The fourth circle is upon us.

Circular ramblings.
As I start another circle in 12 parts I want to say again just how grateful I am for the time and contributions of all my guests over the last 2 years. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunities and challenges it’s raised.

Circles, cycles, endings and beginnings.
When I started in 2020 it was with an idea of creating and posting monthly on the the same date each year, that it would become a monthly and annual ritual act. Art, ritual and magic share so much.

Alongside the monthly mix my studio time is now guided by the Sun’s movement through the zodiac signs, images and vinyl selected to compliment and explore the qualities of the sign, its element and planetary ruler.

The third circle brought a number of new ideas to the project and is where the ideas and interactions consolidate as a social ritual.

All live mixes – In January 2022 I bought some VJ software and started to explore using that during the performances instead of editing post. Wherever possible my guests have joined me physically in the studio and both visual and audio mixes have been improvised live with some mixed results! When my guest was remote, I recorded the audio mix with them over the web live, I then took the live audio and the camera recordings along with any video clips we decided on and used them as the material for a live visual mix.

Modular Synths – I started playing with VCV Rack, a virtual eurorack synthesiser back in August 2021 and by the time I started the 3rd circle had invested in some hardware. I added the Make Noise Strega, the 0Coast and 0Control in February 2022 and over the following months started to use them in the mixes if it felt appropriate. The first mix of the third circle for Aries 2022 with Elsa Davies was the first time they were included.
Sometime around the same time I started playing more regularly with 2 of my previous guests, Jay and Keryl Hodges, continuing the process of selecting and playing records according to zodiac sign and using the sign’s element and planetary rulers to influence the visual material.

Perhaps the years and the different approaches can be seen as echoes of the astrological houses or modal qualities –
1 – The principal act – A monthly vinyl mix
2 – Consolidation and continuation – Inviting guests to participate continuing a process and reiterating the method
3 – Extension and inclusion – Extending and experimenting with more processes to introduce more liveness

The Fourth Circle
I see the fourth circle as a return to the cardinal mode, itself suggesting a new initiatory principle that marks a shift towards more tangible and visible circles both at home and beyond.

Astrologically speaking the 4th house represents the home and family life, echoes the zodiac sign of Cancer and cardinal water. The number 4 also suggests solidity, stability and structure, perhaps representing the solid physical world. With these principles in mind the work will extend further into the physical space of the studio and around my home as well as out to wider audiences in the coming year..

The social ritual that has developed over the year of the third circle with Jay and Keryl will also be extended to create a new, larger circle around the home, engaging more people in the physical world by inviting new participants to social ritual performances around the 4 Cardinal points of the zodiac. The first of these was to take place on the spring equinox but unfortunately I was too unwell to do it, I’m still not sure what that means and how it affects the whole…

A circle in 12 parts: Pisces

/ Jacob Whittaker / Leave a comment

My guest for Pisces this year was unwell unfortunately and rather than put pressure on them to participate, or try and find another with little time for preparation, I decided to take another break from working with guests and use the time once again to revisit work created in the first circle.

This is a live remix of the 2020 Pisces mix. Played on a laptop it goes through a HDMI – AV converter and on into circuit-bent analog video processors and into an analog capture device in Resolume Avenue.

Towards the end of the original recording I started using morphagene to take samples and mix them in. I let the video loop to explore this for a while.

A circle in 12 parts: Aquarius

/ Jacob Whittaker / Leave a comment

Theres always one! and it was bound to happen eventually…maybe inevitably an Aquarius – the rebel, the disruptor…

I decided to revisit my original vinyl only mix from 2020. Here is the mix played on my laptop through an AV converter into a couple of circuit bent analog video processors kindly given to me by Ian Watson.

Below is a mix which combines the original audio from 2020 with a bunch of samples from it played with in the Make Noise Black and Gold shared system Morphagene module.

A Circle in 12 parts: Scorpio

/ Jacob Whittaker / Leave a comment

A combined live audio visual improvisation with contributions and vinyl selection from this years guest Scorpio, Jack Smylie Wild.

I really enjoyed working on this experimental project with Jake. For me, it was a chance to leave my usual writing practice to one side, and focus on enjoying the collaborative process, dipping into areas I’m interested in, but don’t give much time to.

I found a lot of old footage I’d taken, and Jake was happy to play around with it. I also made some new bits of film especially for A Circle in Twelve Parts, transforming myself into a kind of Green Man in the woods, with river clay and leaf litter.
For the live recording on the night, I revisited some characters I used to draw when I was a teenager, for a comic I made called ‘Creatures of the Moonshine’ – which explores ideas around the multifaceted nature of self, and the seeming contradictions and juxtapositions therein.

This work felt more like the start of something than an end-product, and I’m looking forward to getting back into Jake’s lab to conduct further multi-media experiments, perhaps with some spoken word and rap, in the future.