A stream of lucky sounds tomorrow from 11pm on https://awelshstream.co.uk/
I should be SO lucky
Loop
Moving Images
Posted a few new videos on my Youtube channel recently and thought I should probably put something here too…some of these do not appear on Youtube
This year I’ve been looking at using different artists of each Zodiac sign – Gemini artists included Lionel Richie, Prince and Bonnie Tyler.
Cancerians included George Michael and Cyndi Lauper…
At this point I was trying to merge the vinyl loops with samples of music and field recordings as well as the synth sounds..
HELLO
Gemini pop legend Lionel Richie made it a hit back in the 80s, Osymyso used it brilliantly in his ‘Intro-Inspection’ and looking through the databases, finding all the instances of different songs with Hello in the title and thinking of working with them, I was reminded of John Oswald’s ‘O Hell’.
Those songs listed in my databases are – Hello; Hello Dolly; Hello brother: Hello I love you; If you see her say Hello; Hello Again; Hello Earth; Hello Hurray; Hello Mabel; Hello Hello I’m back again; Please tell him I said hello; Hello Dawn; I wanna say Hello; Hello Memory; Hello Old Friend; Goodbye Lover, Hello Friend; Hello Sunshine; Hello Young lovers; Hello Susie; Say Hello, Wave goodbye; Hello Happiness; Hello My Darlings; Hello Operator; Hello Darling; Hello how are you; Hello Goodbye;
So I took a Hello from each of the tracks found and put them together in a sequence, looped it once and it lasts for 1min19. That then goes with loops of Lionel from the 7″ vinyl in a Katzenjammer. During this session I am playing the Hellos file from an ipad and sampling it into the Morphagene. Later in the video, that comes in a bit abruptly and settles in to add different manipulations of the audio.
It is such a nice loop I could play with it all month! Here I put it through an audio to midi converter that is a bit eccentric and doesn’t always get it right and on into the Mimeophon.
Here are all the songs I took a Hello from –
Playing a loop of Hello while setting up at the theatre I was reminded by Sarah about how the word Hello became used as a telephone greeting and learning that quite recently from the Horrible Histories!
Taurean Time Travel – Analogue Vapourwave?
Looking through some old files from years ago I found the DV recordings of journeys made for ‘Following Fingerprints’. The journeys are around the Teifi valley, between my home in Llechryd and chapels along the River. Read more about the original project here
Over the years my work has played with our propensity for nostalgia and the fetishisation of objects from the past. At the moment there is an unpleasant trend within social media to use this nostalgia as a coded call to right wing racist idiots. I listened to an interesting ‘Explaining History’ podcast episode about our love of nostalgia its origins and uses – Listen here
I also read the Grafton Tanner book Babbling Corpse: Vapourwave and the commodification of ghosts a damning look at the music industry and suggests it’s love of the retro and nostalgic is a symptom of our inability to understand the present state of modernity and contemporary capitalism. Really fascinating read available from Zero books.
If you’re not familiar with Vapourwave as a term or music genre check it out! My first and favourite encounter was with this classic by Macintosh plus
Babbling Corpse Synopsis from Zero Books
In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry.
Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media’s ability to appear – as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it – “haunted.”
Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production.
Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave’s many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism’s effect on art, musical raids on mainstream “indie” and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.
The Pilgrim’s Process: Modular Pilgrim
The Pilgrim’s Process started in 2004 and maybe never really ended… (read more here).
Primarily a visual project to accompany Vinyl Altar, a live turntable improvisation performance project exploring religious recordings on vinyl, it also includes a number of videos with fixed soundtracks. These 2 recent videos are made live with live modular synths and Resolume VJ software.
The CD artwork for Vinyl Altar links through to mp3 downloads of the recordings from that disc, recorded in 2005. The film below that was an edit from a much longer work created in 2006 with a broken camera, my first post on the then new Youtube!
the fourth circle: Midwinter circles
The final installment of improvisations for the 4 cardinal calendar points.
Produced live the stream includes the remnants of a fiery circle for Sagittarius for a while before we transition into the liminal space of the solstice, that point of transition leading into a new phase of the year. Another layer explores the emerging Cardinal earth element, filmed by Jay while moving through the landscape earlier on the day.
Live cameras are processed through an analogue circuitbent video enhancer, and layer up with live tarot, synths, vinyl and bass guitar as well as readings of texts on themes of the solstice, earth and Capricorn.
With 2 Capricorns in the room they got to select vinyl for the evening, subsequently looped and processed by Jay through a variety of pedals they merge with the Make Noise synth sounds shifting and evolving over time. Thanks to guests Rhowan, Erin & Manny as well as regular players Jay and Keryl for their thoughtful and playful contributions.
Loops from a pool
POOL: y ddechreuad
POOL is a beginning, the starting point for a stream.
Afon artists are invited to browse a database of vinyl records and select a track or album to create a sonic POOL from which samples will flow and LOOP to become a stream.
Forming in the fixed water sign of Scorpio, POOL suggests the start of a journey into hidden otherworlds. Moving into and immersion in the POOL takes us into the unknown, a place where real and unreal worlds interact, where both become fluid memory and noise is the only true reality..
The POOL starts to form with these selected records :
Joni Mitchel – Clouds;
Johnny Cash – Big River;
Top of the Pops Artistes – Float on;
Neil Diamond – Walk on Water;
Johnny Cash & Marty Robbins – Cool Water
A circle in 12 parts: Aquarius
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
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.
The found of music 