Longplayer was concieved as a thousand year long composition that will play without repetition, with loops of singing bowls playing simultaneously but their positions never matching until a kind of “eclipse” event where after the thousand years have passed the positions will finally be all at their starting position. I use the word eclipse here because that was the analogy given to us when asking about how it worked, with us being told to think of the loops like planets, and having a visualiser that shows the loop position in circular bands that move like a solar system. The sound is then played into both the room it is installed in through speakers and broadcast online so that it can be heard anywhere.

The nature of a thousand year piece has hopeful implications in that it expects for the piece to actually be able to be finished, but also the design of the piece is practical, both being played in the instillation space and online so that a listener can listen in person or via the internet, and in case anything does go wrong or the instillation needs to be relocated – because of the pre-determined nature of where the loops will be at any point in time, the piece can be started again as if nothing happened and also be performed with with live instrumentation.

Speaking of the instillation space, the piece is installed inside an old experimental lighthouse used to test lights and repurposed to house this piece, which is played out of a set of speakers from a computer stored in a kind of shed. When we went to see the Longplayer, they were running a setup that was unintended, using a two speaker setup on the second floor, but I believe the sound was supposed to be coming from the very top of the lighthouse. The actual space the sound inhabits is a room filled with singing bowls, organised into semi circles I am assuming to continue the planetary theming. Their effect initially when I entered the room was me making the assumption that they were being used to make the sound live, and to be honest I was a bit dissapointed when I figured out they are decorative.

I think to truely experience this piece I would have to attend a live performance in the future, the entire concept of this piece relies on extreme lengths of time so I feel like I should give it the time to visit while it is playing as normal and visiting in a few years time when there is a performance taking place. The entire idea of a piece being predetermined and written for such a long period of time creates interesting ideas as well of if say, the piece were to stop playing indefinitely both in a space and online, if that would even mark an end for it, as it has already been established where it will be and what it will sound like in every second until the year 3000. Really interesting piece from a very interesting person, very happy about getting to visit this.

Daniel Menche – Static Burn

“Constructions created with crude analog and digital treatments of tortured electronics, destroyed voices, raw materials and one old forgotten song.”

For this task, I decided I wanted to dig into one of my favourite Electroacoustic albums so that I already had that familiarity but can apply new ideas I learnt to, as well as giving myself a good excuse to listen to the remaster on Menche’s bandcamp. Daniel Menche is mostly recognised as a Noise artist because of his disregard of volume ideals and focus on intensity, but always had a distinctive style that seperated his work from his contemporaries at the time, as the 90s noise scene (especially the American scene) was known for being extremely full on “confrontational” noise all the time, whereas Menche’s work was focused on a different kind of expression entirely that used noise more as a catharsis for his passages of brooding dark ambient focused Electroacoustic landscapes that would flirt with noise ideals and conventions.

(Menche on his 90s material from Andrew Lile’s blog)

“My favorite “making” was my earliest work which was wildly exciting and fun but the actual recording creations are really not good at all. My earliest recordings are my least favorite but the making of them was my favorite because it was crude times for me. I had to make some crazy noise instruments from junk. And then all the grungy dirty noise that would happen. Fun times! Like as a kid playing in the mud. Now it’s playing in the digital clean bathtub.”

I always found the dismissal of this early material puzzling to me because of course it is natural to think of the newest material as the best stuff you’re making and the oldest as the worst, but my personal preference has always leaned more towards the more primitive, really dirty feeling material, because it still holds the ideals of alienating and dissecting sounds that remain constant in his work, but in this more primitive work flow things feel more lifelike and organic, as well as having that really nasty brooding atmosphere and still having the excitement of the strange on-the-spot kind of curiosities I enjoy.

I think that’s enough trying to justify why this one is my favourites, in regards to actually how this album sounds it is very focused on industrial and noise related sound sources, those being “junk sounds” such as the usual junk metal for gestures such as bowing, thrashing and scraping, small metallic objects for fumbling and tapping, as well as what I believe is a stone being dragged along pavement in Part 5, which has always been one of my favourite sounding tracks I have heard because of how unbelievably grimey the sound is. Other mainstay textures are the kind of high distortion sheet metal crashes and feedback wails which unusually never take forefront and moreso suppliment the dread, for example Part 6 starts with a Harsh Noise session which is slowly drowned in layers of lashing motions and reduces the feedback to a siren-like wail.

Getting further away from particulars of each track, a standout element to me is the hissing static washes that linger in the background and march to the forefront, the sparse death industrial thuds that invade certain tracks, the droning ultra minimal ultra low bass which all create an extremely effective dead atmosphere for the sound to live in, even during more subdued passages. Why this sticks with me so much is because of the simplicity, that certain colours of noise and certain frequencies alone can make something feel so cold and scary. The use of radio on this too, using the static (as the title implies as the focus of this album) to create the industrial atmosphere, the soft reverb texture emulating shuffling motions, the complexity of the sound eventually overwhelming, but also in rare cases allowing for him to throw in samples of radio transmissions at will.

Overall I am glad that I enjoyed this album still after however long it has been since I last heard it, it has always been a big influence on my music and I remember early experiments of mine being mostly trying to rip this off. I was scared I wouldn’t like it as much because my interest in dark ambient has mostly dropped off as of recent years, but when comparing this album to the tracks we were shown in class I felt like this would be a good opportunity to think about this album in more detail than I would prior, as I think of it definitely more as an electroacoustic album than a noise album.

For this task I decided to use the opening scene of Persona (1966), which we did do in class but I had not seen the film before and wanted to watch the whole thing afer seeing this part in class, as I found it to be extremely impressive. The start of the scene focuses on the reel of film winding as a kind of deconstruction of the 4th wall, and the sound has an eerie, tense orchestral score rising until the sharp cut of sound as the light turns on and the film reel starts, all sounds being incredibly loud and jarring as to make the audience on edge. The sound design leaves no room for subtlety, as does the imagery, with the winding of the film reel being emphasised to an uncomfortable degree and making the animated film soundtrack feel claustrophobic, stretching this period of stillness in the cartoon out as to intensify the reeling sound and kill the stillness of the visual.

The orchestral score returns as the visuals become cleaner but still being shown in a nightmarish flurry, never lingering on anything for long enough, showing an old silent film, a turanchala and the killing of a lamb, crescendoing at a violent thud of a nail through a hand which the sound of has an uncomfortably powerful impact. The religious themes of the killing of the lamb and the crucifixion bleed into the soundtrack, with serene church bells looping and fading out. The next scene focuses on people sleeping, zooming in on positions of hands and feet of different ages, and repeating a dripping sound that is non empathetic to the visuals, as the source is never made clear, with my intial thought being that it was relating sleep to death, as the reverb in the room has a very cold sound and the dripping has associations with blood dripping, as if they are on the all white bed for an autopsy.

As well as this, this scene has a non empathetic sound of a phone ringing before the boy wakes up, which is not answered and is treated as if it never happened, as well as a phone not being shown in the room at all. There is also shuffling sounding like it is coming from another person inside the room, even though the visuals make it seem like they are in the room alone. The music then crescendos as there are huge images of women blurred and shown to cover an entire wall, with the boy stroking it, leading to the title screen.

I think as well as this being an excellent way to start a film just because of the ideas and how it looks, the sound design of the first minute is such a punch in the face that it lulls the viewer into a hypnosis while the visuals slow down and enter a similar state. The mix of empathetic and non empathetic sound makes a strange kind of severe disconnect, and use of sounds tore from their sources to create a tension that is never relieved (for example, the use of a phone ringing would give the expectation that it will be answered). After seeing this introduction section for a few times disconnected from the rest of the film, I think it’s finally time to get started on the full thing.

For this exercise, I decided to listen to a recording from back in Liverpool but found that there weren’t very many at all, but I found this recording of the Liverpool harbour (https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=41732&snd=47583) to be quite inviting.

The soundscape has a constant hiss of wind and washes of water with an underpinning engine hum drone which gives the recording a very cold atmosphere. Filling this space is a kind of alarm that is being set off in several different places, some further away from the microphone than others and some in the left channel, some in the right, which creates a kind of lulling hypnosis with the non rhythmic patterns that it moves between each alarm. Of course because of the location there is all kinds of machinery whirring and metal containers being banged against and making soft thuds, while the lifting machinery can be heard winding softly, making this cold industrial experience.

I listened to this recording 4 times, which I found very easy to do because of how soft and inviting the sound is, and found it quite a relaxing experience to sit with an atmosphere for a while and decypher the sources and try and articulate how they sound and feel like to me, as well as having a nice break hearing what an area of Liverpool sounds like that I have never had the inclination to go anywhere near.