The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow.
8pm, Saturday, 18th November.
Tickets £10 – available from here.
The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow.
8pm, Saturday, 18th November.
Tickets £10 – available from here.
Released by French label, TRUC, ‘The Golden Cassette’ is a compilation album in a limited boxset including a golden tape with printed liner notes and illustrated map.
It is based upon the idea of revisioning or remixing the Golden Voyager record sent out into space as a greeting message from planet earth to extraterrestrial life forms.
The album features work by: Mark Vernon, Jay Mitta, Felix Kubin, Prins Zonder Carnaval, Insólito UniVerso, Boubacar Cissokho, Alastair Galbraith, Los Siquicos Litoraleños, Charbel Haber, Tarawangsawelas, Shuta Hasunuma, Cara Stacey, Li Daiguo, Pierre Bastien, Chyskyyrai, Tim Hodgkinson & Ken Hyder and JTM.
Available to purchase here.
I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new collaborative album with Paris based DJ, sound artist and producer, Elen Huynh.
‘Mal de Débarquement’ features 10 tracks created for a collaborative broadcast made in 2020 on LYL Radio for the show Choses Contraires. With the intention of creating a form of a radio essay, the pieces were constructed from raw recordings, pre-composed elements, patterns, sung, spoken, whispered and hidden voices.
Available as a tape or download. The cassette is a limited edition of 100 copies with Riso printed inlay card by anais____98 featuring artwork by Bloeme van Bon.
You can order a copy of the tape or the download here.
‘Tomorrow Is a Big Distance’ is available as a CD or as a download here.
The Waverley, Edinburgh from 7.30pm. More details here.
SONICALLY DEPICTING (temporarily renamed SLOPPILY DEPICTING) and TFEH co-present an evening when it’s finally safe to leave your home after the last dregs of The Festival trickle away down the drain…
With BANANA (Alexandra Spence & MP Hopkins), Mark Vernon, Marlo de Lara and Off Brand Asthmatic.
Magneto Mori: Brussels is a process-based sound work that investigates the collective memory of Brussels residents, intertwining them with the environmental sounds of the city to weave new and unexpected narratives. It is an exploration of tape recording as a form of memory storage – and the deliberate distressing, eroding and deterioration of present day sounds to disrupt their chronology; historicising the present and fast-forwarding the effects of time. Contrasting and combining these sounds with higher fidelity recordings draws attention to the different substrata of time that are an intrinsic (though largely unacknowledged) part of any non-realtime sound production.
The intention here was to create a ‘memory tape’ that acts as an audio portrait of the city and its inhabitants. This involved asking people to recall their earliest or most vivid memories and recording them direct to open reel tape. On the other side of the tape everyday sounds of the city were captured.
Through a series of processes that mirror the complexity and frailty of human memory this ‘memory tape’ was then fragmented, muddled, corroded, partially erased with magnets, buried in the ground for 10 days and finally excavated and reconstituted. During this process sounds and memories are literally erased and the remains are spliced back together in a random sequence. The end result is a cut-up collage of fragmented voices and distorted field recordings. In some instances I chose to ‘re-construct’ parts of the missing memories using copies made of the original recordings.
In counterpoint, a semi-autobiographical text by Elodie A. Roy reflecting on her parents memories of Brussels is interspersed throughout the piece appearing as a series of answerphone messages.
Produced during a one-month residency at Q-O2, Brussels in August, 2022.
Commissioned by Kunstradio for Ö1 ORF, Austria. First broadcast at 22.05 CET, 21st May, 2023.
Narration written, performed and recorded by Elodie A. Roy.
All other recordings by Mark Vernon.
Composed by Mark Vernon.
Featuring the voices of Henry Andersen, Diana Duta, Julia Eckhardt, Nika Breithaupt, Stuart McGregor, Amber Meulenijzer, Pauline Mikó, Caroline Profanter and Mark Vernon.
Thank you to the participants, everyone at Q-O2, Elisabeth Zimmerman, Elodie A. Roy, Barry Burns and Manja Ristić.
“This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”
(Don Draper, Mad Men)
Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind’s eye – projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listeners’ mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism.
Using these found slideshow commentaries as a framework, a series of musical soundscapes have been created to bring the absent images to life, activating the listeners’ imagination in the classic tradition of ‘cinema for the ears’. It’s a little like looking through a family photo album where only the hand written captions and mounting corners remain; the photographs themselves have all been removed. The evocative rattle and clack of the projector shuffles through different slides as the fragile voices of our tour guides accompany us on a sonic journey that fractures time – and through the cracks, the past bleeds through into our present.
With special thanks to Manja Ristić, Barry Burns, Gonçalo F Cardoso and Bill and Marjory Howard.
Produced with the support of the Creative Scotland and the PRS Foundation’s Open Fund.
Discrepant / CREP 102 LP / DL
“This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”
(Don Draper, Mad Men)
Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind’s eye – projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listeners’ mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism.
Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the 60s and 70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from my own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that I have collected over the past twenty years.
Using these found slideshow commentaries as a framework, a series of musical soundscapes have been created to bring the absent images to life, activating the listeners’ imagination in the classic tradition of ‘cinema for the ears’. It’s a little like looking through a family photo album where only the hand written captions and mounting corners remain; the photographs themselves have all been removed. The evocative rattle and clack of the projector shuffles through different slides as the fragile voices of our tour guides accompany us on a sonic journey that fractures time – and through the cracks, the past bleeds through into our present.
With special thanks to Manja Ristić, Barry Burns, Gonçalo F Cardoso and Bill and Marjory Howard.
Produced with the support of the Creative Scotland and the PRS Foundation’s Open Fund.
Reviews:
“Call Back Carousel helps us to recall the charm of an antiquated mode of presentation. By restoring dignity to the slide show, Vernon makes the practice worthy of re-evaluation …a disorienting, time travelling montage.”
Richard Allen, A Closer Listen (June 2023)
“It’s somewhere in that space, between the imagined sounds of those lost photos of an experience no one will ever quite know, that Vernon captures a flickering piece of humanity.”
Bandcamp, Acid Test’s Best Albums of 2023, Miles Bowe, December 11, 2023
“…rich soundscapes that tell of a quaint, eccentric Britain that’s almost faded completely from view …realised in stereo, with all the humour and quiet familiarity you’d hope for.”
Boomkat (June 2023)
“Vernon treats the audio with the kind of care and respect reserved for ancient fossils as he restores them through wonderfully descriptive soundscapes and vivid foley design. And gradually, through sound, a picture begins to develop.”
Bandcamp Daily, Acid Test, Miles Bowe (August 2023)
“Call Back Carousel is a nostalgic, whimsical, demented and quite melancholic sound journey through historical sites, famous landmarks, tourists spots and must-see places around the globe during a bygone era… It’s strange and intriguing, creepy and alluring, bittersweet and playful, haunting and amusing… and also creatively adventurous, which makes for a delightful and fulfilling listening experience.”
Audio Crackle (August 2023)
Oscillation festival, 27th – 29th April, 2023.
MILL (Needcompany)/HISK: Rue Gabrielle Petit 4, 1080 Molenbeek, Brussels.
For the Oscillation festival I will be performing a new piece, ‘Time Deterred’, on Saturday the 29th April at 10.45pm.
Tickets available here.
Delving deep into his tape archives, audio archaeologist Mark Vernon presents a specially-devised quadraphonic performance featuring lost voices, found sounds, tape trash, small objects, tape loops, and field recordings. By intermingling found tapes and voices of the past with memories and recordings of his own, a multi-layered tapestry of sounds is woven, blurring and overlaying different time periods in what could be described as a form of sonic time travel. Within this hiss of history, faltering magnetic memories fade and resurface, bobbing like audio flotsam and jetsam on a sea of white noise.
More details here.
Wednesday, 3rd May, 2023, Les Instants Chavirés 7, rue Richard-Lenoir 93100 Montreuil – France
Tarifs:
13€ plein tarif
11€ prévente et Montreuillois | acheter en ligne
10€ abonnés Instants Chavirés | s’abonner
Horaires:
ouverture des portes 20h00 | concert à 20h30
More details here.