On a visit back to my parents house to grab some speaker cones for a DIY project, I found myself talking to my father about my daydreams on liminality. His immediate first reaction to hearing about it was to talk about water; about how for the ancients water was the supreme liminal substance, a barrier between this world and the next. The river Styx, throwing coins into wells, the lady of the lake passing on Excalibur to King Arthur. The first obvious connection is the Thames; the core of London, providing it with commerce and wealth for almost its’ entire history, but upon further investigation I remembered hearing something familiar….

A few streets away from my parents’ house on a wide, suburban corner in the middle of the road, is a manhole. When walking past this manhole, one can hear the fierce, rushing current of water below. I’ve heard it my entire life, and it always earns itself a small mental note whenever I pass by. This linked back to another point of interest that I have had over the years – the lost rivers/canals/tributaries of London. Waterways that were once our ancestors’ lifeline have slowly been build over, neglected to tunnels and passageways underneath our feet. Their frantic flow sounds on deaf ears. These flowing bodies of water are echoes from the past; the Fleet, the Effra, the Tyburn. All names that we no longer recognise, but to the past peoples of London they were as familiar as Oxford Street is to us.

My decision to link the topics of my two assignments to one another means that somewhere along the line I will have to decide which aspects fit into the academic side of things and which aspects will fit into the artistic side of things. Psycho-geography (coined by Guy Debord) seems to be a main linking factor within my essay-based musings, the idea being that exploring London through its’ links to the past can be another playful way to explore how it makes you feel. Trying to catch a glimpse of how the ancients saw our city by understanding that which brought them all together; water.

In terms of my audio assignment, I want to focus on my own experience with water. There is a water processing facility within sight from the back side of my parents house, and it’s always been interesting to me. The manhole cover, liminality, hearing things that we can’t see, listening to the past. These are all linked points in my thoughts about creating an audio piece from my research.

Inspired by Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’ which was introduced to me in one of Gareth’s classes, I explored some tape manipulation techniques; pitching, driving, encoding with NR enabled and playing back with NR disabled. These techniques really helped me warp the sounds of my own voice, and I was surprised at how authentic the results sounded.

This was an exciting first experiment, and I pursued the idea further over the next few days, using my Tascam 414. Bouncing from computer to tape, altering and then bouncing back during another pass.

I felt like I was approaching a sonic fingerprint that I felt echoed my feelings well. The destruction of my voice was interesting and very transformative. I felt like I wanted to say more meaningful things in each recording, though. The test recordings were speaking nonsensical sentences, endless waffling with long filler words describing superlative actions. I began to think about if an alternative was needed.

My initial idea was to slowly degrade my recordings by passing them along a very long tape loop, running through three separate cassette players. Each cassette player would be a different output coming into my DAW, and combining both the varying playback qualities with different processing on each channel, I will have a long triple delay with each repeat being more distorted than the last, with the tape finally returning into the ‘recording’ player and being wiped with new audio. This sounded good in my minds ear, and I had the tape players necessary. I didn’t have enough tape shells so I quickly ordered some in.

Upon the shells arriving I suddenly felt that I would be going to a lot of effort to precariously create this long tape loop around a room passing through three discrete players, but the physicality of the process would be lost on the listener. The audio would be distinctly analogue sounding, but I felt that half of the power in this piece was in the unstable layout of tape machines visualising the audio progression in real time. For this reason, I decided that this technique would best be lent to an exhibition-style piece as my flat is very small with not much space to work with.

For this reason I decided to keep digital for this project. Some analogue might find its way into the signal chain, but not as a central focus.

I’ve decided to focus on the self, with regards to how the self revolves around interactions with other people, and how we can potentially define ourselves using external activities. For example; one might associate with the idea of being a party animal, or a live performer, or being very vocal and outspoken when in social settings. During a pandemic these external forces are brought to a screeching halt, and ones sense of self may be altered by that. Social skills that were once well lubricated fall by the wayside and become rusty after a year of hardcore neglect, and the activities that once defined us have become impossible to experience.

How does my own voice sound to others? How do they remember me, on whose mind is my voice imprinted, my verbal mannerisms? These are questions that I would like to hold in my mind while working on my audio for this sound piece.

I enjoy talking, I enjoy explaining and reveling in lavish feats of linguistic extension and I feel that this is at the core of my being. I take plenty of inspiration from the works of P.G Wodehouse, and greatly admire his impressive handle on the English language – something that I aspire to be known for.

But, how can I illustrate my social sense of self within sound? How can I illustrate that my words and spoken voice is something that I desire to reconnect with, something that I feel I am missing out on?

Out of the choice between people or places, (with regards to the subject matter of my individual composition) I pondered, for a moment, and then felt wholly and completely drawn to people. To voices, perhaps, and to how distinct and unique each voice appears. We get to know certain voices very well and can easily identify them, even when those individuals are attempting to mask their voice, from a very early age.

This seemed curious to me, an evolutionary sensitivity to the vocal range of audio, our ability to detect the slightest change within that band; so I decided to probe the matter some more. I soon came upon the idea of memory; the memory of voices, and then came the realisation that memory is an imperfect medium of recording. When you are reconnecting with someone they might not be exactly how you remember, because your memories can degrade and alter over time, sometimes leading to the formation of completely new (false) memories, or of distorted half-truths. I wanted to illustrate this disconnect between memory and reality, with recordings of my own voice or those of people around me with whom I am familiar.

Morphing these sounds over time would allow me to mask some features and accentuate others, smearing and smudging until the final voice recordings are unrecognisable or alien when compared to the source audio. This seemed a good thread to tug at, so it stuck around.

// made from writings on paper from roughly 3 weeks ago //

Myself and Dean, the group dubbing engineers, wanted to create a composition that was not just surreal and absurd in its individual components, but also in its overarching arrangement. We strove to create conceptual contradictions, and also to constantly surprise our listeners. This meant crafting a journey from start to finish that was entertaining, interesting and relentless. We wanted the piece to grab the attention and then twist the mind of the listener beyond comprehension, and I feel that we managed to do that very well. Listening to the piece is a very strange experience, and certainly one that feels unique and creatively charged. We wanted juxtaposition and contradiction, and harsh mood changes. This, we achieved. I feel that we did the most we could’ve with the given time, although maybe a few more minutes would’ve been appreciated to let each piece shine. There was lot of ‘gash’ as it were, and much of the work that Group D managed to produce didn’t make the final cut. This is the only thing that I feel we compromised on, and was a necessary evil that I’m happy to say we couldn’t have circumvented in a million years. The alternative is overlapping pieces, which fixes the issue but also means that each piece doesn’t sit in the composition alone, doesn’t find time to shine as much. I feel we arranged very well, and compromised very little. I’m definitely satisfied with the final piece.

I’ve been thinking a lot, since a lecture with Dawn and Ed from earlier this month, about how little radio as a medium is used to its full potential. The ‘War of the Worlds’ radio series stands out as a prime example for me. It’s life-like presentation in the style of a real life broadcast was phenomenally effective, with much of the public actually believing that there were aliens landing on our shores. Another example given by our tutors was an aired interaction between blind people and zoo animals, which I feel is perfectly suited to radio as one becomes empathetic with the individuals in the situation. All sight is lost, and one shares a strange moment of bonding with the people featured in this show, about how difficult communication becomes once sight is no longer an option.

We couldn’t find a way to do this in our own 14minutes set, but not for lack of trying. We thought at first that we could arrange for the entire 14 minutes to feel like a radio show, with adverts and interviews and a live performance or two. This fell short of the mark. There were plenty of other ideas thrown around, but eventually we felt that we didn’t have enough time to create something as conceptual as we could’ve otherwise. We thus settled on the absurdist bombardment.

The first segment of our 14minute radio broadcast is intended to be distinctly low fidelity. I had the perfect device to achieve this – my Tascam Portastudio. Slamming onto tape would both create saturation and also compress the audio to remove peaks. I also had a trick up my sleeve; the 414 MKII Portastudio comes with in-build dynamic DBX noise reduction. Recording with this turned on encodes your audio with the features of the noise reduction – notably, a dynamic boost of the high frequencies onto tape, which, when played back with the exact opposite settings, results in the same clean recording with distinctly less noise. However, if played back without the noise reduction turned on, the audio is audibly thinner, brighter and weaker, with strange compression artifacts. Cutting the high frequencies as well as all of this gives a weird, hollow sound that I utilised along with the distortion to create the low fidelity effect for section A.

In the process of mixing this project together I realised that it lacked a certain human touch, it didn’t feel completely compositional in its abstract nature. I pondered on how to make it feel like it had human intentionality to it, which was a problem that fellow group D inmate Travis turned me on to. Myself and Dean eventually settled on the two sections approach, the first being very Lo-Fi, encouraging tension and perhaps annoyance, which makes the moment that the second section arrives herald bliss, full frequency range and clear mixing intentionality. It’s one of my favourite techniques within music – tension and release, and I’m glad that it came to my rescue once again.