Saturnine Orbit

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“Mark Vernon revisits the life and work spaces of an isolated and meditative Morandi, making the debris of everyday life reverberate through spectral soundscapes and eerie tones: an exercise in modern hauntology.”

Commissioned by Xing, ‘Saturnine Orbit’ was a new sound installation, radio series and live performance made for the Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi and in the spaces of the Campiaro barns (a favourite subject of the Bolognese painter during his holiday periods in the Bolognese Apennines in Grizzana Morandi). The work was produced as part of the ART CITY Bologna 2024 festival in association with XING, MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and NEU Radio.

Both the 6-channel installation and the live performance were composed entirely from the sounds of Morandi’s summer house, his studio, replicas of the objects used in his still lifes and sounds recorded on the mountain trails he would often walk, starting behind the Casa Morandi.

Alongside field recordings collected on site during the production residency, Vernon employed Morandi’s objects as sound instruments, using the negative space of bottles, pots, jugs and vases from the Casa Morandi studio as small resonant chambers, while the environmental field recordings of the surrounding countryside were played from inside these objects using tiny speakers amplified by microphones. Through this process the outside becomes the inside: the world in a bottle. In addition, by recording sounds directly to open reel tape Vernon created a linear tape collage of sounds with an instant narrative of its own. The tape acts as a chronological sound diary, verbally annotated with the location, time of day and the weather conditions. The piece also features excerpts from the only extant recording of the Bolognese artist’s voice.

Sound installation at the Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi –
Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th February, 2024.

Live sound performance at the Fienili del Campiaro (also streaming live on NEU Radio) –
Sunday 4th February, 2024.

All photographs by Luca Ghedini, courtesy of Xing.


‘post-chance’ CD out now on Erstwhile

 

Marc Baron & Mark Vernon – post-chance

This new collaborative project is out now as a CD release on the New Jersey based label, Erstwhile.

The CD marks the results of a year-long dialogue over the course of which we sent fragments of unspooled open reel tape to each other in batches. A sort of abstract correspondence by means of tape. The tape fragments contained a series of sound experiments, sketches or audio snapshots. Each package also contained a magnet that would partially erase the contents. We copied the tape both before and after its journey and used the original recordings and their ‘ghost’ counterparts to form the basis of this composition. The first time we actually met in person was when we began to assemble the piece from the mountain of material we had accrued.

“A fascinating collaboration that plays like listening to a conversation already fading from memory …a choir of spirits released from quarter-inch tape.”
Jibril Yassin, Tone Glow

“The album is like all the most elusive and ingenious tricks of analogue tape manipulation brought together in a showcase of studio sleight of hand.”
Derek Walmsley, The Wire

You can order the CD or purchase the download direct from Erstwhile here.

I have a limited number of artist copies available for £12 plus P&P. Just drop me an email if you’re interested

Sound Installation at Casa Museo Morandi

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Commissioned by Xing, ‘Saturnine Orbit’ is a newly commissioned sound installation, radio series and live performance made for the Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi and in the spaces of the Campiaro barns (a favourite subject of the Bolognese painter during his holiday periods in the Bolognese Apennines in Grizzana Morandi). The work was produced as part of the ART CITY Bologna 2024 festival in association with XING and MAMbo.

“Mark Vernon revisits the life and work spaces of an isolated and meditative Morandi, making the debris of everyday life reverberate through spectral soundscapes and eerie tones: an exercise in modern hauntology.”

Both the 6-channel installation and the live performance were composed entirely from the sounds of Morandi’s summer house, his studio, replicas of the objects used in his still lifes and sounds recorded on the mountain trails he would often walk, starting behind the Casa Morandi.

You can hear the audio from the installation by using the player above.

Radio Belgrade Electronic Studio Residency

 
For the next week I’ll be working on a new collaborative project and micro residency at Radio Belgrade with Manja Ristić.

We will be based in the Radio Belgrade Electronic Music Studio – the only place of its kind in Serbia that allows professional research in the domain of electro-acoustic music, providing tools for production of electro-acoustic music and radiophonic art. The studio famously hosts the incredibly restored EMS Synthi 100. We will be using the time to generate new material using the Synthi 100 as well as processing field recordings and found tapes gathered on previous visits to Belgrade.

You can read the story of Radio Belgrade’s restoration of the EMS Synthi 100 here.

Saturnine Orbit

Exciting news about a forthcoming residency, installation and performance commission for 2024:

Xing presents:
Saturday 3rd & Sunday 4th February 2024
MARK VERNON (UK)
Saturnine Orbit

sound installation & live, première
Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi + Fienili del Campiaro
Grizzana Morandi (Bologna)
A special project for ART CITY Bologna 2024 on the occasion of Arte Fiera in collaboration with MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and NEU Radio.

On Saturday 3rd & Sunday 4th February, 2024, Xing presents as a special project for ART CITY Bologna 2024, ‘Saturnine Orbit’, a specially commissioned sound installation and live performance by Mark Vernon in the Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi and in the spaces of the Campiaro barns, a privileged subject of the Bolognese painter during his holiday periods in the Bolognese Apennines in Grizzana Morandi. Mark Vernon revisits the life and work spaces of an isolated and meditative Morandi, making the debris of everyday life reverberate through spectral soundscapes and eerie tones: an exercise in modern hauntology.

The project is in collaboration with MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and NEU Radio.

For Saturnine Orbit Vernon creates an instant linear tape collage of sounds with a narrative of its own. The tape acts as a chronological sound diary, verbally annotated with the location, time of day and the weather conditions – considerations that might have been important to Morandi as a painter. Alongside field recordings collected on site during the production residency, Vernon will employ Morandi’s objects as sound instruments, using the negative space of bottles, pots, jugs and vases from the Casa Morandi studio as small resonant chambers, while the environmental field recordings of the surrounding countryside will be played from inside these objects with tiny speakers and microphones. Through this process the outside becomes the inside: the world in a bottle. In addition to digital recordings, Vernon will use a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, a sound technology that would have been in use during Morandi’s life time. Excerpts from the only extant recording of the Bolognese artist’s voice will also be included.

All the material thus collected and recomposed will be presented in a sound installation with a more abstract compositional tone, and in a live performance that will have more of a performative visual element focusing on the manipulation of objects and other props, interactions between mics and speakers, the tape player and tape loops. During ART CITY, a daily series of sound extracts from the creation in progress will be aired on NEU Radio; the live sound performance in the barns will also be broadcast live.

Programme:

Saturday 3rd February
11am – 6pm
sound installation
Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi

Sunday 4th February
11am – 6pm
sound installation
Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi

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4 pm
live sound performance
Fienili del Campiaro
(also streaming live on NEU Radio)

+
From Wednesday 31st January to Saturday 3rd February
3pm + 3.30pm + 4pm
Saturnine Orbit – sound diary
3 minutes daily on air

Where:

Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi
Strada Provinciale di Grizzana SP24, 115
Loc. Campiaro – Grizzana Morandi (BO)

Fienili del Campiaro
Strada Provinciale SP24, 112
Loc. Campiaro – Grizzana Morandi (BO)

Free access

Free shuttle service timetable and reservation:
https://www.culturabologna.it/events/mark-vernon-saturnine-orbit

Sheet Erosion

Audio Archaeology Series Volume 3: Brest

Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France.

The piece is comprised of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document the recordist, Michel’s tastes in music and radio programmes of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations.

In the composition family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.

Field recordings used in the piece include: Le Téléphérique de Brest (cable cars), hotel lifts, wind whistling between railings on the Pont de Recouvrance, wind whistling through gaps in doors, traffic, ventilation units, fans, light bulbs, alarms, automatic toilets, soap dispensers and hand driers.

The piece was originally commissioned as a radio work for Kunstradio and was first aired on Ö1, Austria on Sunday 29th August, 23:00 – 0:00 (CET). An album version has since been released as a CD on the Sonoris label.

Sheet Erosion

Audio Archaeology Series Vol​.​3: Brest
Sonoris / SNS-25 CD (2023)

Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France. It was originally commissioned as a radio work for Kunstradio, Austria in 2022.

The piece is comprised of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document the recordist, Michel’s tastes in music and radio programmes of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations.

In the composition family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.

Released by Sonoris, France as a CD in a limited edition of 300 copies with 4-panel full colour digipak featuring artwork by Mark Vernon. Available to purchase direct from Sonoris or Cortical Art.

Reviews:

“Vernon is a skilful and sympathetic excavator of found tapes… There’s the sense of life repeating itself not with the computerised logic of the loop, but the impressionistic skim-read of memory… Vernon revels in the patina of vintage sounds without locking the listener in place and time.”
Derek Walmsley, The Wire magazine (February, 2024)

“…if Mark Vernon’s work can sometimes be likened to radio art, it’s a far cry from radio nostalgia, or the mystification of a regretted past. Here, we’re talking about erosion – in the sense of degradation, deterioration – and saturation – in the sense of excess. Like the image of a world on the brink of collapse. So hurry before the programmed disappearance!”
Jérôme Noetinger, Revue & Corrigée

 


Reviews in Full

“Vernon is a skilful and sympathetic excavator of found tapes, but this time around he didn’t find much of note in the French city of Brest’s flea markets. On the final day, Michel, a contact from the festival Vernon was attending, gave him some of his own family’s reel-to-reel archive, a goldmine of memories preserved in sound. “Lean Developments In Noisy Thoughts”, “Bucolic Plague” and “Every Page A Gentle Wave” present motifs recorded from a TV’s loudspeaker which are knitted into an elliptical, eerily recurring structure.

There’s the sense of life repeating itself not with the computerised logic of the loop, but the impressionistic skim-read of memory. Like fellow UK musician Robin The Fog, Vernon revels in the patina of vintage sounds without locking the listener in place and time.”

Derek Walmsley, The Wire magazine, February, 2024

Mark Vernon likes to explore the sonic environment of a specific geographical setting like an archaeologist. After Lisbon (“Lend and ear, leave a word” released in 2016), Thailand (“Ribbons of Rust” published in 2019), here we are in Brest for the third episode of his of his Audio Archaeology Series. As usual, he mixes field recordings made on site by himself with other recordings made by anonymous people and recovered by chance from flea markets or other encounters. We then witness a confrontation of temporalities in this working method which allows engagement beyond the immediate period of the field recording, creating a network of new connections between past and present. Dissolving chronology into multiple temporal flows. One could imagine oneself in a Philip K.Dick universe! In any case, we’re a long way from the spirit of phonographic postcards, far from the spirit of culture and heritage. It’s more like a collage of found objects, in the intimate interstices of a vanished experience, in the complicit off-field of a reduced listening. The main treatment given to all these recordings lies mainly in the mix highlighting the characteristic of each support, and also in the fact that we sometimes re-record with a mic directly in front of the loudspeaker. The found or recovered recordings carry a grain and a story – at least the one that we make of them. Beyond the magnetic tape itself (for sounds recovered), its quality, its breaths, its weeping and shimmering, it is also the content of the tape itself that carries a story through anecdotes (radio credits), slices of life and even handling defects. And if Mark Vernon’s work can sometimes be likened to radio art, it’s a far cry from radio nostalgia, or the mystification of a regretted past. Here, we’re talking about erosion – in the sense of degradation, deterioration – and saturation – in the sense of excess. Like the image of a world on the brink of collapse. So hurry before the programmed disappearance!

Jérôme Noetinger, Revue & Corrigée (translated from the French – see below for the original)

“Vernon is a long-time producer of radiophonic works, and various are site-specific. ‘Sheet Erosion’ is number three in a series of Audio Archaeology, and this time, he visited the French of Brest. “It comprises field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s.” These tapes are from someone named Michel and reflect his taste in music and radio programmes. Vernon didn’t use cables to capture what was on the recordings but used the speakers and recorded whatever else happened at the same time. There’s a telephone, conversations, the wind howling around the cabin (if indeed it is a cabin. I might be imagining things), people talking and ‘then’ meets ‘now’. The space in which he plays his sounds becomes an instrument of transformation, as do the objects he finds in the place. Sometimes, the speaker gets obscured and muffles the sound; sometimes, the music from the tapes is very recognizable (although, for the life of me, I can’t remember the tune’s name), and not at all. Does Vernon use some kind of processing? Digital or electronic? I thought about it every time I heard this CD, and in these somewhat quieter days before Christmas, there was indeed some more time to listen to it, and I’m unsure. There are bits in here that I think could very well contain some kind of electronic processing. Still, I also considered the possibility that everything he does comes down to unusual ways of capturing his sounds and maybe some filtering, removing specific low or high frequencies. Whatever it is that he does, it adds to the mysterious quality of the music. As always, it has a kind of radiophonic quality combined with the qualities of a great horror movie. Some of this material is very ghostly and obscure, but I appreciate it mainly because of that eerie atmosphere. It doesn’t scare the living daylights out of me, but it has a cosy, creepy sound; the sound of yesteryear, perhaps, a sense of longing for the past. Maybe it’s a conservative zeitgeist thing? Maybe it’s just old age! I love it.”

Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, December, 2023

“Mark Vernon aime à explorer l’environnement sonore d’un cadre géographique précis tel un archéologue. Après Lisbonne (“Lend and ear, leave a word” paru en 2016), la Thaïlande (“Ribbons of Rust” paru en 2019), nous voici à Brest pour ce troisième épisode de son cycle Audio Archaeology Series. Comme à son habitude, il mélange enregistrements de terrain réalisés sur place par ses soins avec d’autres enregistrements effectués par des anonymes et récupérés par le hasard des puciers ou des rencontres. On assiste alors à une confrontation de temporalité dans cette méthode de travail qui permet de s’engager au-delà de la période immédiate de l’enregistrement de terrain et de créer un réseau de nouvelles connexions entre passé et présent. Dissoudre la chronologie dans de multiples flux temporels. On pourrait s’imaginer dans un univers de Philip K.Dick ! En tout cas, on est très loin de l’esprit carte postale phonographique, loin de l’esprit culture et patrimoine. On serait plutôt dans un collage d’objets trouvés, dans les interstices intimes d’un vécu disparu, dans le hors-champs complice d’une écoute réduite. Le traitement principal apporté à tous ces enregistrements tient principalement dans le mixage soulignant la caractéristique de chaque support, et aussi dans le fait de parfois réenregistrer avec un micro directement à travers le haut-parleur. Les enregistrements trouvés ou récupérés transportent un grain et une histoire – en tout cas celle que l’on s’en fait. Au-delà de la bande magnétique elle-même (pour les sons récupérés), sa qualité, ses souffles, son pleurage et scintillement, c’est aussi son contenu qui transporte une histoire dans l’anecdote (générique radio), les tranches de vie et même les défauts de manipulation. Et si l’on peut parfois rapprocher le travail de Mark Vernon de l’art radiophonique, on est très loin de radio nostalgie, ou d’une mystification d’un passé regretté. Il est ici question d’érosion – dans le sens dégradation, détérioration – et de saturation – dans le sens de l’excès. Comme l’image d’un monde qui court à sa perte. Alors vite avant la disparition programmée!”

Jérôme Noetinger, Revue & Corrigée

Live at Full of Noises

From 7pm on the 25th November I will be playing a special quadraphonic live set at the newly refurbished FON headquarters at Piel View House, in Barrow Park, Barrow-in-Furness.

Tickets available here.

– and the following day I’ll be running a free workshop ‘Memories are Made of Hiss’ looking at tape as a form of memory storage, playing with field recordings, tape splicing, degrading recordings with magnets, tape loops and other methods of fast forwarding the effects of time.

Piel View house from 11am – 5pm, Sunday 26th November. Sign up here.

Sheet Erosion CD – out now

I’m excited to share the news of my latest album release on the excellent Sonoris label based in France. The CD is available to purchase direct from the label here – or from Cortical Art here.

Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France. It was originally commissioned as a radio work for Kunstradio, Austria in 2022.

The piece is comprised of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document the recordist, Michel’s tastes in music and radio programmes of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations.

In the composition family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.

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