9.30 am. A fruitless foray to the Farmers’ Market, where no eggs or cross-boar kidneys were (again):

10.30 pm. A day in the studio, working with the recording of the engraving made from the Welsh translation of the second commandment. On this occasion it was filtered through Handboard 2:

Many sounds are possible, but few are appropriate. The source text is the most important filter by far. It constrains or disciplines the output of the electronic filters. I find myself searching for dark and unsettling sonorities, in keeping with the spirit and context of Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai (Exod. 19-20; Deut. 5). In respect to the latter, along with the noise of thunder and the voice of God enunciating the commandments, the text also records ‘the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud’ which ‘sounded long, and waxed louder and louder’ (Exod. 19.19). These sonic elements belong to the source’s intrinsic soundscape and, therefore, must be honoured in my interpretation.

1.20 pm. I’m planning to visit to my hometown of Abertillery in the summer. I’ve not returned in over four years. I go whenever a season for personal reappraisal beckons, to touch the ground of my ancestry and social, cultural, and spiritual roots :

2.15 pm. An apparently failed line cable (subsequently revealed to be a plug that had been part pulled out of its socket) and a broken power cable held up proceeding for the first part of the afternoon. He who lives by technology, dies by it. 3.00 pm. The train begins to move again. Low frequency, thunderous rumbles, as I push the Welsh translation through the repaired Handboard 1 with low-pass filters at full. One further fly past, with resonance and at a higher pitch, and it’s quits for the day. 4.45 pm. Dinner duties call.

6.20 pm. An evening with the family.

9.00 am. A little postgraduate admin and, then, a lurch towards the studio for a day of sound manipulations, while connecting my ailing Apogee Duet A/D interface to my study’s iMac. The ‘send’ MacBook in the studio presented a output failure for no apparent reason that, as mysteriously, self-rectified. I’ve no idea why this happened, either way. This is unsatisfactory. A problem that can’t be understood, can’t be resolved even if it has been fixed. I began working with Handboard 1, and the sound of the engraving derived from the King James Version of the Second Commandment. 10.30 am. The production menu: to create sonic modulations that are, variously:

1. gritty, dirty, lo-fi, fractured, barely holding together, nasty, and unpleasant to the ear;
2. heavily punctuated, with vocal timbre, phased, and reminiscent of Morse code, expressive speech, and the noise of a 12-inch file on hard metal;
3. low pitched, dark, resonant, a little unnerving, fluctuating like the flutter of a candle flame blown by the wind, with distant somewhat musical but almost inaudible sounds;
4. low pitched, very resonant, and muffled (as though heard from underwater);
5. ringing, scratchy, anxious, and with few bass frequencies.

While the tracks (each of 20-minutes duration) were being processed, I reflected upon one of the roots of my interest in sound art — the aural diary. This is ‘a document of experience, sensation, place, and people made using audio recording’ which I’ve kept intermittently since 1985. I used a cassette-tape recorder (and, latterly, a digital recorder) like a camera, in order to make field recordings of my own life:

Street sounds, Chinatown, Grant Ave., San Francisco (1.25 pm, Thurs. 4 July 2013)

The motivation was threefold. To:

1. acknowledge and tokenly preserve some of the transient phenomena associated with living: the voices of family and friends, sad and celebratory occasions, the ambient sounds of a place and travel, and mundane conversations and events;
2. explore the potential of sound to evoke a recollection and the mental image of the thing recorded;
3. create, over time, a body of material that might form the basis of artworks in the future.

1.30 pm. After lunch, I completed the fifth modulation.

The same source sound was, then, filtered through Handboard 1. This board produces mellower and more organic sonorities than Handboard 1, due to the analogue nature of the Moog filters. A further four modulations were captured. There might be something from today’ work that is useable. I simply don’t/can’t know. Moreover, I’ve still no idea what shape the overall composition will take, or of what elements it’ll be comprised. And that is a best place to be for the moment: without presupposition.

7.30 pm. I returned to ‘stocktaking’ after dinner. I’m trying to understand a strand of related concerns that have emerged in both my art practice and art historical writing since the late 1990s:

9.00 am. I began with research admin — arranging a studio booking at the National Screen & Sound Archive of Wales to record the Welsh and English readings of the Second Commandment for the ‘Image & Inscription’ project. I listened to Ed Pinsent‘s review of the R R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A album. I take his point … In the CD blurb, I emphasise the process governing the composition of the pieces, which is what academics have to do in order to justify the practice as research. So, how does the author address, critique, and otherwise objectify the ‘passion’ and ‘humanity’, which Pinsent hears in the recording, within a scholarly context? I’m challenged by this.

10.45 am. The Special Cases Committee met to discuss the sometimes appalling struggles students face while undertaking their degree. The return of fine weather is welcome:

12.10 pm. I got back to homebase to continue where I’d left off. My spiffy new HD USB cable has arrived. Sound recording can begin in earnest tomorrow:

1.45 pm. More Postgraduate Research formation.

2.40 pm:

Going to School, A Ladybird Learning to Read Book (London: Willis & Hepworth, 1959)

An image from a more innocent age for children. Or, perhaps, an age of innocence that masked a darkness that is only now being revealed.

At the School. 3.00 pm (7.00 am Vancouver time). The first of two PhD fine art phone-tutorials (tele-tuties) for the afternoon. Writing about one’s subjective experience of one’s own subjectivity and the work that arises from it, and in a manner that’s accessible to scrutiny, is a toughy. 4.15 pm (4.15 pm Birmingham time). The second call. Maintaining a full-time teaching job and undertaking a part-time PhD Fine Art degree is a toughy too. 5.20 pm. ‘We go into school’.

6.20 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. I reversed the ‘send’ and ‘receive’ pathways between the two MacBooks in the studio. Now, the playback of the engraving sound is routed via the RME analogue/delay unit through the two handboards to the mixer and, from there, to the recording MacBook, via the new USB cable. Test. Test. Test.  Adequacy has been transcended. On, then, to refining the tracking weight of the record deck’s cartridge:

9.45 pm. And, finally, as the evening closes:

9.00 am. The proofs for my chapter on the R R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A project have arrived. It’ll be published by The Courtauld Institute of Art, London in a book on Revivalism. The proofs will require my attention for most of the morning and some of the afternoon, possibly. First task: explain ‘pink noise’ to an art historian:

Once I’d responded to all the copyeditor’s comments, I made a new set of high-resolution figure images for publication. Afterwards, I discovered that the original captions file was lost. (‘Stuff happens!’, as they say.) My consolation was that in writing the captions a second time, they might be done better. However, the file eventually turned up; apparently, misplaced in a subfolder. But amendments were necessary in the light of new instructions regarding the formatting of captions, recently issued by the publisher. Then, on with the 150-word biographical statement. My policy is: keep it short and to the point. Err on the side of modesty. (You aren’t as good as others believe you are, and far worse than you think.)

55-year old men (and I am one) will pause to reflect on the death of Charles Kennedy today:

Death is appalling. It robs the dead of everyone and everything. Sudden death, the more so; in that moment, their ambitions, aspirations, and anticipations are, alike, rendered null and void. Early death, the greater still; it severs what they were from what they might have become, with the force and finality of a guillotine.

2.15 pm. Having completed and dispatched my chapter et al, I looked to the bigger picture: the vision for what I’m hoping to achieve in the next few years (with the caveat that one doth not know what the morrow may bring forth, either for good or ill). The exercise is something of a tradition at this time of year. Stocktaking, as it were.

3.00 pm. A distraction. (But not unrelated.) Off the top of my head, at one student’s/musician’s behest — my eight desert island discs. Too many are left out. I’m free to change my mind, of course! What do they have in common?

An inventory of stock for June 2, 2015:

Commentary-upon-commentary. The above is neither a spider diagram nor a mind map. Those type of schematics only outline themes and their possible relations. They commit one to nothing. More often or not, in my experience, they’re an exercise in prevarication masking as preparation. My approach enables me to hold a fruitful conversation with myself. I can change, expand, criticize, delete, expound, fuse, and divide ideas with each successive revisitation (of which there are three in this instance). The process can go on for a very long time, or at least for as long as it takes to crystallize understanding.

7.15 am. I cajoled myself into reviewing some of the PhD monitoring forms and draft thesis submissions, until 9.20 pm. Thereafter, I un-bolded the easy emails in my inbox — the type for which either ‘OK!’, or ‘No’, or ‘See you!’, or ‘You’re kidding!’, or ‘Over my dead body!’ is a sufficient response.

8.30 am. I picked up the weekend’s windfall of email, and made a few responses to the more pressing messages prior to a 9.00 am MA inquirer’s consultation at the School. The party’s over; the undergraduate and postgraduate shows are, now, unplugged:

9.30 am. I responded to MA and PhD applications. I wish applicants for the Fine Art degree would enclose either a CD of, or a link to, their current visual art work. It would help expedite a decision far more quickly. 10.00 am. A sound-editing tutorial with one of the MA fine art students, who’s a photographer. The manipulation of sound files is, in essence, analogous to that of photographs (either chemical or digital). In this case, the student’s recordings are, like their photographs, documents of the objective world. I suspect that they’ll get a handle on the — what is presently — unfamiliar technology very quickly. 10.30 am. I gathered together and stored my own sound equipment, which had been used by a BA student during the show, and headed for homebase. As I left the School, a new exhibition was being installed in the large gallery:

Rebecca Collins, the author/curator of the exhibition, is a PhD student at Theatre, Film & Television Studies. The Opening begins at 6.00 pm on Friday. 11.15 am. I continued with admin until lunchtime. (One of Otomo Yoshihide’s extraordinary feedback guitar performances provided a sonic backdrop.)

1.30 pm. After lunch, I set up Handboard 1 (a powerful network of filters that is capable of ripping a sound source into bits — quite literally) and retested the recording process that I’d established in relation to Handboard 2 on Saturday:

Before recording began, I balanced the new DJ deck, attached it to the mixer, loaded a vinyl, and took the record for a spin:

Balancing the tone-arm is a small feat: too light, it bounces across of the surface of the record; too heavy, it risks burying itself in the groove. I enjoy this type of problem, as well as the physicality and manipulability of vinyl recordings.

3.30 pm. On with preparations for the recording. I’m focussing on exploring one filter at a time. In principle, one ought to deploy the least amount of technology to the greatest possible effect. Possibilities are already beginning to open up.  Analogue equipment cannot easily and precisely recall the parameters set to produce a particular sound after the devices have been switched off. Consequently, I have to make a recording immediately a useable sound is sculpted.

6.30 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. Set-up Handboard 1 and made a digital capture of a sound made through the OTO Biscuit, before shutting down the studio for the night.