October 18, 2014

8.30 pm. Set-up. The rig was assembled in under an hour. Power-up. Handboard 1 made an unfamiliar noise, like a clicking pulse, with no obvious culprit. There’s an inevitable terror associated with using a complex electronic network: the prospect of experiencing some unaccountable and unforeseen glitch in the system at the eleventh hour. In the professional sphere of music, the problem would be cheerfully handed over to the sound engineer. In the sphere of sound art, the artist is often the technician too. Having checked the network (I have a procedure for rationally isolating faults), I deduced that the phaser/flanger at the beginning of the chain was errant. Once removed, the network was quieted. Thereafter, hums were quelled, unity gain established throughout the system, and a test recording made. ‘The readiness is all’:

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11.00 am-1.00 pm. Throughout the the morning, Open-Day visitors were drawn to the ‘peculiar noise’ (as I heard it described) and into a conversation about my equally strange behaviour: poking fingers into the guts of portable audio devices (which had clearly see better days) and, like some sadistic torturer, prodding them with electrical probes in order to elicit a shriek. Some explanation of my indulgence was necessary, one which took in the history of sound art from 1913 onwards, and the crucial part that painters had played in its evolution:

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2.00 pm. After lunch, I was in my stride: noises were coerced from all but one device, looped, superimposed, and variously filtered. I heard sounds that evoked some of Louis and Bebe Barron’s ‘tonalities’ for The Forbidden Planet (1956): the death rattle of circuits in extremis:

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3.40 pm. The audio capture will probably not yield any compositional material. That was not the intention. Nevertheless, the outcome may be sufficiently engaging to merit a sonic montage, as a token and document of the day’s efforts. 4.00 pm. Power down. Set down.

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6.00 pm. An evening with the family.

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October 20, 2014