√bulldozia

Discovered in 2011

Personal review of the year. Another self-indulgent Hogmanay tradition.

		Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Listened to a lot of piano this year: Nils Frahm, James Ross, Hauschka. But this Cuban composer's latest album, Fé, contains multitudes and trumps them all.
		Blipfoto. My brother just had to point the way and within days I was hooked. A very simple formula has created the most stimulating and convivial place on the web.
		Jon Rose & Hollis Taylor. Viktoria Mullova aside, quirky violinists of the year have to be this couple, who can turn any strung wire into an amazing instrument and tell a story.
		The Plays of Zora Neale Hurston. A fan for 25 years, yet I  avoided her work for the stage. Mule Bone, Polk County and a hilarious sketch called 'Filling Station' taught me a lesson.
		London Sound Survey. With this year's remarkable Waterways Soundmap, this vast treasury of recordings old and new may have crossed over at last. A vital, illuminating resource.
		Edgelands. One of the most enthralling travel books I read in a while. Stylishly penned reflections that draw out the poetry and politics of rubbish tips, sewage farms, fences and pallets.
		Deadwood. In Treatment is still entertaining me but the filth of this frontier camp in South Dakota had all the best lines, and Al Swearengen may be a better therapist than Paul Weston.
		Islay. Cloudless skies, no midges, two punctures, croquet lawns, an airport with a cattle grid, chocolate and beetroot cake, and a fire alarm at Ardbeg. A July weekend to remember.
		Aidan Moffat and Bill Wells. In Wells' jazz ensemble, Moffat has found the perfect vehicle for his brutal dead-pan narratives of love, sex and death. Soundtrack to a Scottish Spring.
		Scottish Gaelic. Strictly speaking not a new acquaintance but the first serious attempt to learn it began this Autumn. Bliadhna mhath Ùr dhuibh uile!

Three faces of Christmas Eve

Pop Videos of the Future

What if field recordings became popular?  You know, like pop songs?

In a piece on a field recording posted in tribute to Ahmed Basiony, killed in the Cairo uprisings in January this year, Marc Weidenbaum asks a similar question.  The recording, made by John Kannenberg, is one of a series of museum recordings, all lasting exactly 4 minutes 33 seconds - a duration in tribute, of course, to John Cage.

Weidenbaum continues:

It's no doubt something of a pipe dream among those of us who enjoy field recordings, but should the act of recording the sound of a place ever become nearly as popular and common as is taking photographs of places, it's imaginable that 4'33" would become a if not the standard length of such an audio document, the same way that there are standardized dimensions for photos.

This may be true. And indeed I have made some 4'33" recordings of libraries, other places of relative silence, that might appeal to our inner Cage.

But if 4'33" is one standard (equivalent perhaps to an album), then one minute is another (the seven-inch single of the field recording world, we might say).  Think of the Quiet American's One-Minute Vacations or Sound and Music's Minute of Listening project (to which I have offered some contributions). Sixty seconds is also the (approximate) length of the sonic postcards that are emerging from the City Rings venture.

Whatever. But if these became hits, one thing they would need is a video.  What would a field recording pop video look like?

Well one thing they wouldn't look like are those videos on YouTube that document people making field recordings (usually to create sound effects) or offer tutorials in using field recording equpment.

More promising is a Vimeo group that goes by the name of, um, Field Recording.  John Kannenberg himself has a A Sound Map of the Egyptian Museum here, which displays a floor plan and indicates where in the building the different recordings were made as they play.  South Bank Skate consist of a sequence of still images taken of a skate park, while the soundtrack appears to be a continuous recording of people skateboarding there.

There are some films of musical performances which, while they make full use of the acoustic space (and one, Notturno, recorded in a working steel foundry, is actually dominated by the ambient sound) still offend the purist in me, who doesn't want to call these field recordings.

But probably the most common approach found here is to present long takes from a static camera, positioned close to where the recordings were made.  Among my favourites is this clip of Zurich airport at night by Made for Full Screen:

I like this sequence too, animate structures #4 by John  Grzinich, exploring the aeolian effects of strong winds on the landscape and the built environment in the hills just north of San Francisco:

Also interesting is Transplant - 06/07/2010 by Keir Docherty, a close-up of foliage, with the movement of motor traffic on a busy road beyond, which dominates the soundtrack, part of a 'series of short videos which capture simple moments of everyday life from a very particular perspective.'  The point being to demonstrate that while trees and plants are often introduced to conceal roads from the eye, they are much more effective at masking the visual rather than the aural, even though they do dampen the sound.

These are all fairly close to what I imagine a field recording pop video would look like. The long takes, the static camera, the relative absence of movement within the frame, all help to draw attention to the soundtrack, and yet allow a certain tension between sound and image, given that there will always be a mismatch between what you hear and what you can see (like noises originating off-screen, but also events on-screen that, perhaps unpredictably, cannot be heard). And it is a tension that doesn't tend to exist with photographs which do not carry the same (if any) sonic expectations.

The makers of such films have sometimes found it useful to work to a set of rules. Made for Full Screen drew up guidelines for a Vimeo group called The Pictures Don't Move:

1. No camera movement (zoom, pan, …)
2. No editing (cut, time manipulation, …)
3. No performance (acting, dancing, …)
4. Original sound (no music, …)
5. At least 30sec long!

Two years later with over 400 videos, the principles have clearly struck a chord. Despite frequent flagrant (and sometimes spammy) disregard for these rules, there are some great films here.  But after watching a few, my growing feeling was that they were visually too busy.  Or at least that their creators were more interested in what you see rather than what you hear.  Perhaps at some level they were trying too hard not to be boring.

That's never been a problem for me. Long fascinated by constrained writing, I have been experimenting with a set of rules of my own. Unaware of The Pictures Don't Move until a few weeks ago, mine are similar, but in effect add more conditions, namely (1) the films must be exactly one minute long, and (2) the source of most of the sounds must be off-camera (to insist on all would be one step too far, I think). 

1. One minute because, as I suggested, it is becoming one of the standard formats for field recordings, but also because producing a series of works of this length (which could be joined together to make a longer film made up of identically-sized segments) help to sharpen your awareness of this - often merely rhetorical ('just give me a minute') - unit of time that we take for granted. I suppose my gamble is that this rule can help produce something that makes a minute seem much more precious and longer-lasting than we often allow.
2. I think a key to this stretching of time is to encourage the viewers to listen as intently as they watch, and to point the camera away from the source of the sound is one of the best ways of doing this. And there is no better way of slowing you down than imposing a rule that breaks the ingrained habits of almost everyone who makes and watches videos.

One video in the Field Recordings group that obeys this acousmatic principle is Geijitsu Mura Koen by Brown (also an active member of The Pictures Don't Move group).  It is grotesquely long - almost two minutes - but repays repeated ... I was going to say listening, but what we need is a word that combines listening and viewing (with more of the former than the latter).  Listiewing perhaps.

My own efforts have been focused on a project that is bound by even more limitations: Scottish Minutes. The plan is to produce sixty one-minute videos in accordance with these rules, but with the additional objective of covering a wide variety of locations in Scotland (rural, urban, maritime, etc) at different times of year and times of day. In the last eighteen months I've made five.  It may take some time.

It almost goes without saying that these rules favour those with fairly unsophisticated equipment.  They could be made quite easily using a smartphone. I tend to make things more complicated for myself. Used to making sound recordings, I normally use binaural microphones with a minidisc recorder for the audio, and a cheap point-and-shoot digital camera. Back home I transfer the recording onto computer, choose the segment I want and attach it to the matching segment of film (replacing the original audio taken by the camera).  Of course, since much of the sound is off camera, precise matching of sound and image is not usually required.

Here's an example of a non-Scottish minute. A Short Film About Flying, made at Warsaw's Chopin Airport.  You will notice that not only are these videos done on the cheap, I don't even bother to clean the camera lens properly.  How rock'n'roll is that?

Malcolm X as Photographer

One of the surprises for me reading Manning Marable's recent biography of Malcolm X is the number of references to him as a photographer. In the summer of 1963, for instance, to a civil rights demonstration in New York, he 'brought along a 35-millimeter camera and busied himself taking photographs. "If there were no captions for these pictures, you'd think this was Mississippi or Nazi Germany," he informed one New York Times reporter' (p253).

This is not the first mention of Malcolm filming demonstrations. It seems he made a habit of it, possibly because the mainstream media could not be relied on to report objectively, but also, perhaps, to help the Nation of Islam identity (or at least provoke) FBI observers and infiltrators.

On holiday in Miami with his wife, children, and Cassius Clay in January 1964, he kept a notebook in which

he drafted several paragraphs about his family's visit to Clay's training camp that were designed to be the basis for a feature news story, 'Malcolm X, the Family Man.' Most of his notes were captions designed to accompany photographs he had taken (p280).

During his second trip to Africa and the Middle East, he toured Algiers 'by taxi, leaning out of the car window to take photographs', apparently catching the attention of the police who detained him on departure at the airport, believing the photos to be a security risk (p319).

An evening program at the Audubon Ballroom organized by the Organization for Afro-American Unity in January 1965 'featured color films taken by Malcolm during his travels' (p404).

This suggests his interest in photography extended to cinematography too, and indeed, several images of Malcolm show him holding an 8mm movie camera, like this one published in Life magazine, taken at London Airport in July 1964.

Here's another picture of Malcolm holding a camera:  And there is actually a similar shot (possibly taken on the same occasion) on the home page of the Malcolm X Project, a collection of resources compiled in association with Marable's biography.

But most intriguing of all is the claim that de Laurot's remarkable film Black LIberation (1967) features Malcolm X not only on screen but 'behind the camera'. You can - if you're lucky to get a good connection - stream a video here, but it is impossible to guess which bits of footage he may have been responsible for.

Surely there is enough here to merit further investigation.  Malcolm was not the first political leader to try to control his photographic image. But a leader who wields a camera in public is certainly unusual and cannot be attributed solely to a concern over how he was represented. After all, most of the film he shot would have been of people and places he encountered, not of himself.

Perhaps it is time to return to the vast on- and off-line Malcolm X archive and ask it questions about photography that it may not have been asked before.  How skilled a photographer was he? Do his photographs and movie footage evince a particular sensibility, even the hints of a radical aesthetic practice, or are they indistinguishable from conventional holiday snaps? At any rate, the special interest in photography on the part of someone who was almost exclusively identified with a - very distinctive - verbal (largely oral) delivery might cause us to wonder about the co-existence of these very different rhetorical forms in his repertoire.

There are five boxes of photographs in the Malcolm X Collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.  The collection description record is fairly general, but does indicate that it includes 'portraits of African-American expatriates and visitors, and views of crowds, possibly photographed by Malcolm X during his visits to various African countries, particularly Nigeria and Ghana (ca. 1964).' 

Looks like a good place to start.

Jackie and Bob

It seems incredible that I could have lived more than fifty years and not have heard 'Oboe' by Jackie Mittoo.

But, as I was compelled to stop doing the dishes and turn up the volume when this beguiling instrumental came on the radio this evening, it would appear to be indeed the case.

Something about it sounded familiar, though. That five-note motif (first heard at 0'25") nagged me.  Where had I heard this before? Who had sampled it?

I scrubbed at a pan and put the kettle on. My son could tell from my manner that I was preoccupied.  He asked me what was wrong, but I couldn't explain. I told him it was nearly bedtime and went through to run his bath, scared that the song would end and I'd miss the announcement that would tell me what it was and the riff would simply evaporate.  For you can't (yet) sing to Shazam.

And then it came to me. Wasn't it used in 'A Touch of Jazz' by DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince?

Actually, no. While he was splashing and singing the Octonauts theme at full belt in the bathroom, I played the 12" and realized what I was thinking of was the better known 'Westchester Lady' by Bob James:

The motif (first heard at 0'09") is similar but - played straight after the Jackie Mittoo - is much more distinct. And, of course, more samplable. You can see why it caught the attention of Jazzy Jeff (and several others).

Bob's tune came out in 1973, Jackie's three years later. I assume the quotation is deliberate. Roaming online just now I came across one comment that suggested that 'Oboe' is a cover of 'Westchester Lady', which is pushing it, and only true in the sense that John Coltrane's 'My Favourite Things' is a cover of that song from The Sound of Music.

Let's face it, Bob James is pretty cheesy. This song, with its cringeworthy title, is a lifetime's supply of Dairylea. That five-note series is the only thing going for it, unless jazz funk arrangements polished to a dazzling shine thrill you per se.

But embedded in the loose ensemble sound you hear on 'Oboe', Jackie Mittoo shows that riff has legs. Its meandering, improvisatory quality, together with those never-quite expected splashes and swells of keyboard and cuts in the rhythm, make it far too interesting to listen to in a lift or hotel lobby. 

Its nine and a half minutes deserve your full attention.

An Outline of a Critique of Political Economy

I am old enough to remember decimalisation, which finally took place in Britain forty years ago this week. As an eleven-year-old in his first year at secondary school, who had never been abroad, it was my first taste of that slightly queasy feeling you get when you have to think in two different currencies at once.  I recall the frisson as p’s and d’s mingled promiscuously in my pocket, the conversion tables on the walls of post offices and newsagents, the impending obsolescence of the eleven and twelve times tables.

But above all I am reminded of an event some ten years later: now a student at Birmingham University whose routes across the city often took in one of the alternative bookshops that nurtured the subculture.  These institutions, defined negatively in that they offered what mainstream bookshops did not - a good coverage of left-wing politics, imported fiction and poetry, alternative health and non-western religion - nevertheless came to feel as if they obeyed a single organic principle.

They flourished in university towns, but not exclusively. As a teenager, I regularly visited a tiny one in Blackburn, Lancashire on my way home from school, spending money from a paper round on treats like How to Grow Your Own Marijuana, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and the latest issues of Peace News. 

Nowadays, that rapprochement is almost over, the trade fragmented between Buddhist Centres, herbalist emporia, welfare rights offices, with gentrified boutiques like the London Review Bookshop virtually the only places left for readers who think of themselves of independent mind.  Where now can you walk in off the street and pick up a copy of Amilcar Cabral, Alexandra Kollontai or Ernest Mandel?

The nearest to my first flat in Birmingham was in Moseley, its volumes of Gramsci and Jung always faintly perfumed with jasmine and patchouli, although, with its squeaky wooden floors and gloomy mezzanine to the rear, retaining a studious air missing from its more activist-oriented twin situated on the curve of St Martins Circus Queensway in the city centre, filled with natural light that nurtured house plants and made hand-written cards curl around drawing pins on the noticeboard.  

A mile away was the Communist Party bookshop, tucked away a block or two back from the busy A38, which pretty much stuck to printed material and felt a little more intimidating and austere in comparison, although it was already livened up with the snazzy covers of Martin Jacques' Marxism Today and Robert Natkin's colourful abstract paintings that adorned the cover of the first generation of Verso's translations of French, German and Italian socialist intellectuals (most of whom are hardly spoken of today).

Not that these developments left much mark on Progressive Books and Asian Arts in Selly Oak. There were fans, incense, some fabrics and posters, but I was drawn to the shelves lined with the cream paperbacks of Peking’s Foreign Languages Press editions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and of course Mao himself, alongside the darker hues of the rather more durable hardbacks that offered their Selected or Collected Works.  A ramble on the web just now tells me that the bookshop was run in the 1970s by Jagmothan Joshi, General Secretary of the Indian Workers Association, a fact of which I was completely unaware at the time. When I used to visit, the proprietor was a taciturn and somewhat intense man in his late twenties or early thirties, perhaps an eternal postgraduate, whose longish hair, cardigan and brown suede shoes made me think of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Not long after I discovered it, the shop was holding a closing-down sale, offering two-thirds off all stock. I chose The Poverty of Philosophy (60p, still pencilled on the now rather faded cover), Selected Letters of Marx and Engels (also 60p), Anti-Dühring (which seems to have disappeared from my collection) and a volume of Mao's Selected Writings that included the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan and On Contradiction in it (£2).  Even at marked prices they represented excellent value for money at a time when - as a glance at the back covers of other books I bought around the same time reveals - a copy of Discipline and Punish would have set me back £2.95 and Althusser's For Marx a stomach-clenching £4.25. 

And for each one, Stockhausen diligently calculated the promised discount.  And what I liked about this ritual was, when he took up the Penguin edition of Engels' Selected Works and noticed that the price printed on the back cover - for it must have been on the shelf for more than a decade - was an uncorrected 7 shillings and sixpence, without missing a beat he rapidly executed the mental arithmetic and informed me, with a hint of a smile, that I owed him 12½p.

I don't know if this sale made the slightest difference to his fortunes as he made his way in the world following the shop's demise. But in honouring the agreement to reduce his prices to the point at which they became almost meaningless I think he made a tiny difference to mine.

Vending Machines

Sound Diaries just announced an intriguing new project: Vending Machines of the British Isles. A coffee machine at Oxford Brookes University is to blame, apparently, having served as a prop in more than one sound-related workshop over the last few years.

We thought that it would be good to hear some other vending machines from around the British Isles, and to create a sonic collection featuring the distinctive sounds of automatic dispensation.

To submit your recordings (and photos), follow the instructions. You have till the end of March.

I sent in my first contribution yesterday, documenting a fairly unimpressive soft drink dispenser in the St Enoch Centre in Glasgow, its bland, almost silent, operation further drowned out by the sound of Phil Collins and alerts coming from adjacent contraptions. Hopefully I'll find some better ones to record in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, here, in tribute, is a very basic mash-up of some recordings of vending machines on the fabulous Freesound website. Basically, I searched for, er, 'vending', and was presented with a page of the first 15 results.  The great thing about Freesound is you can activate more than one embedded player at the same time. So I set them off one by one (with the loop feature enabled), and captured the growing cacophony using Audio Hijack. For such a simple procedure, I thought the pay-off was pretty good.

Vending Machines by bulldozia

Our Future

Yesterday, the Observer, followed a long – but not, I think, distinguished – New Year tradition of asking a panel of experts to predict the future. Specifically, their brief was to identify the key developments they expected to take place in the next twenty five years in various fields, 'from the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport.'

What is troubling about this - and similar – projections is not their proverbial inaccuracy. An AIDS vaccine, driverless cars, the answer to the dark matter question. Who knows if and when they will arrive?  The problem is their use of the first person plural.

• 'We will be sharing videos, simulations, experiences and environments, on a multiplicity of devices to which we'll pay as much attention as a light switch.'
• 'I think we'll be cycling and walking more.'
• 'We'll learn more about intervening in our biology at the sub-cellular level and this nano-medicine will give us new hope of overcoming really difficult and intractable diseases.'

What is it about the future tense that makes 'we' so attractive? Switch it to the present or the past and the universality it seems to imply would look distinctly forced. Is it not possible that some people might benefit or suffer from these changes more than others?  Will the shining rays of the world to come strike us all at the same angle?

Why is it that these predictions always seem to invoke an undifferentiated 'we' when the disappearance of social division and inequality is not one of them?

Are you in Glasgow?

New Best Friends 2010

They meant almost nothing to me a year ago. Now I realize what a difference they can make.

		Drip Audio. Everything released by this Canadian label is a joyous surprise. Fond of Tigers, Tony Wilson Sextet and Subtle Lip Can delighted me again and again.
		Sharks Took the Rest. First I discovered Beccy Owen's astounding album Down with Gravity, and then her new band practically forced me to go and see them in Newcastle in July.
		Notes for an Atlas. Sean Borodale reimagines the streets of London in a 370-page fragmented poetic transcription of thousands of things seen, read and overheard.
		Soundman Binaural Microphones. I never thought something you stick in your ear could change your life. Now I just need to figure out how to move on from minidisc.
		SoundCloud. Why has this become my second life? Check out coney island sound, shbadr, Beam Up & DJ Delay and the exquisite field recordings of daigoro for starters.
		NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. I may have perished in the Spring without the good-humoured ministrations of the staff at the Intensive Care Unit at the Western Infirmary. m(_ _)m
		Dany Laferrière. Not exactly a stranger, but after reading four more of his novels this year, I finally have the measure of him. In other words, I don't know what to think. In a good way.
		False Economy.  A superb website that provides powerful arguments and statistics for those fighting the waves of public spending cuts proposed by the UK government.
		The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Paule Marshall's Proustian anatomy of the postcolonial condition hasn't dated in over forty years.
		Treme. And so to New Orleans. Janette asked Davis if the check from the tourism board was in the mail. Sure.  But these survivors of disaster capitalism are gunning for much more.