Author: Mark

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Sing it Softly to the Pebbles

meagre resource / mere024 CD (2008)

Sing It Softly to the Pebbles was produced by Vernon & Burns for the exhibition ‘Open Field’ at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, November 2008 – January 2009. The CD is comprised of spontaneous stories, improvised music and field recordings made in and around Claylands Farm near Balfron over the course of two years. Culled from a series of informal, improvised music sessions the initial recordings have been substantially edited, reconceived, processed and mutated by Vernon & Burns to produce a surreal, dream-logic fairy tale. Wendy Woolfson was asked to improvise stories as a response to the music. Her responses were edited and rearranged and in the end rarely matched up with the piece of music she was originally reacting to. The final track ‘Die Bauchrednerpuppe’ is an additional purely instrumental track produced at the same time. It was conceived as a soundtrack to an imaginary puppet show.

A radio edit of ‘Sing it Softly…’ was broadcast on the Clear Spot on Resonance 104.4 FM in December 2008.

Featuring:
 
Music by Barry Burns, Katy Dove, Sarah Kenchington, Belinda Gilbert Scott and Mark Vernon.
Improvised stories by Wendy Woolfson.
Sighs by Xia Huang.
Artwork by Katy Dove and Tian Miller.

“Mark Vernon and Barry Burns won my heart years ago with a brilliant, entertaining and humourous LP called The Tune the Old Cow Died Of, a tape-edit masterwork on which they almost reincarnated themselves as many-tentacled mad BBC Radio producers from the fifth dimension. Here’s their welcome return on Sing it Softly to the Pebbles (meagre resource productions mere 024), a complex assemblage of field recordings, sound effects, music and story-telling which they put together with the help of various collaborators, including a writer, an animator, a painter and an inventor of musical instruments. These 26 mostly-short tracks are almost like tiny episodes from a non-existent radio soap opera, a sort of avant-garde version of The Archers. As such, they lend themselves to radio broadcast, and indeed the piece – originally commissioned for a contemporary arts event in Glasgow – was played on Resonance FM last Boxing Day.

There is a restrained and very pastoral charm to Sing it Softly, and while I personally found the narrative elements (and the overly-precise speaking voices) a bit cloying, that’s my problem entirely. I do sense that Vernon and Burns have had to rein in their more experimental methods slightly, in order to help the collaborative process succeed. That said, it’s still a work full of much originality, economy, and ellipsis”.

(Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector)

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Mort Aux Vaches

Mort Aux Vaches ‎/ MAV062 CD (2010)

From a session for VPRO radio comes Vernon & Burns long awaited CD in Staalplaat’s Mort Aux Vaches series. A limited edition of 500 copies in embossed sheet copper metal packaging.

This album features recordings originally produced for a Vernon & Burns special on the ‘Dwars’ radio show. The programme, produced by Berry Kamer, featured interviews and exclusive tracks by Vernon & Burns and was aired on VPRO (Dutch National Radio) on the 21st June 2007. The show is archived here.

Reviews:

“…with their genuinely odd and original approach to manipulating radio segments and old records, they were a perfect choice to make a radio piece for VPRO in Amsterdam. This is one of the most unsettling and baffling things I’ve heard from them, which while it doesn’t lack for a sense of humour is also deeply confusing and induces many a crinkled forehead in unwary listeners. One of the great things about these artists (who actually have experience producing conventional radio) is they are never out to shock people with crazy effects, like using extracts from interviews with mass murderers. Instead they create their beguiling effects slowly and patiently with relaxed smiles, using very every-day found materials, and gradually sapping our sense of normality. Packed in a folded and embossed sheet of copper with a sunburst emblem mounted on the centre, and originally recorded in 2007. 500 copies only of this must-have item!”

(Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector)

“… a bright spot in the lineage of the incredible Staalplaat series. Spoken and sing-song word blend with peculiar noises, rustling through silverware, vintage harmonies and aerodynamic editing, like audio-gaming, stitched together seamlessly. On this twenty-one track disc of short snippets there are discordant marriages between bombs and bloated accordians, syrupy pours and creaky doors. It’s dimensional, a very physical effort. Gangsters and ladies make shady deals, whistling as a Victrola scrapes along the edge of vinyl, output quite rustically over some weary campfire song. It’s all quite vintage, warm good fun — all packaged in raised copper with coinage and frills its imprint keeps its distance but teases of something somehow familiar”.

(T.J. Norris, Toneshift)

“Does humour belong in music is a legitimate question once asked out loud by Frank Zappa. And it is a question I would like to ask again while listening to the Mort Aux Vaches edition by Vernon & Burns. For their sessions recorded for VPRO Radio in the Netherlands they created several short pieces, sketches you could say… stories in sound, sometimes dramatic, other times funny, other times plain serious. With a sense for experiment they have worked on bringing together samples from films, TV and radio with abstract musique concrète. While every piece tells a different story still there is a big connection between the different stories in sound colour. Also, even in the pieces where no or very little spoken word is used there is a sense of fun and humour added… Great pieces of musique concrète with a huge sense of cabaret. You can hear the duo knows very well what they are doing … From their point-of-view you can indeed say humour belongs in music. Recommended listening.”

(Sietse van Erve, EARlabs)

“… sees a return to the radio play days, as they incorporate a lot of spoken word in their little pieces. They don’t make necessarily a story per se. Not inside a track, but also not as a whole. These stories rather set a mood, although it’s not a clear one. It might be a different mood for each listener. There are funny bits, sad bits, melancholic bits, spooky bits, all packed with musique concrète elements, electro-acoustic music and such like, which are placed with great care onto the spoken word material and the plundered sounds from old trash-bin records… quite fascinating stuff really. This CD – recorded in 2007 already – shows Vernon & Burns at their best… Much better to spend your time with this than watching any tube.”

(Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly)

“… organized in the form of a rather weird and chaotic radio-drama, full of spoken word and sampledelic interludes, yet delicate in the quieter insertions – the classic pieces, the exhibition of electroacoustic and “musique concrete” elements. If this metaphor doesn’t explain the complexity of this work clearly enough, then imagine an abstruse conceptual cabaret where each piece tells an independent story, but where style permeates everything with irony and subtle mastery”.

(Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural)

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Remnant Kings

Cosmovisión Registros / CRVA004 Cassette (2017)

New tape ‘Remnant Kings’ released on Cosmovisión Registros Andinos, 2017. Limited edition of 50 copies.

Bits and bobs. Odds and ends. Scraps and leftovers. Remnant Kings takes its name from a Glasgow fabric store that historically dealt in offcuts, end of line textiles and fabric remnants.

The cassette consists of a series of audio collages based around a single found reel to reel tape. On that tape were gathered various home recordings from the 60’s and 70’s in a ‘best of’ compilation spanning a twenty year period – a kind of ‘Greatest Hits’ family album in sound that must have been made for a close relative. The tape included amongst other things; baby talk, a toy railway set, playing and practicing music, bird song, conversation, karaoke style sing-alongs and some home experiments with tape echo, along with popular music of the day.

In addition to the found tape other sound sources include whistling, water droplets on a hot plate, broken ice, creaking gates, an electric fan played with a brush, excerpts from improvised sessions with open reel tape manipulation, feedback and electronics plus various other field recordings.

Artwork by Tian Miller.

Reviews:

“Mark Vernon is the English tape-hoarder genius who remakes the abandoned effluvia of past generations into wonderful and beautiful sound art. He continues his project on Remnant Kings (COSMOVISIÓN REGISTROS ANDINOS CVRA #004), a cassette tape released on a Chilean label. For this instance, he got most of his source material from a single found tape, a reel-to-reel used by a family to document home sounds in the 1960s and 1970s; his shopping list of the contents is “baby talk, a toy railway set, playing and practising music, bird song, conversation, karaoke style sing-alongs and some home experiments with tape echo, along with popular music of the day”. Some other moments of process-noise have been added, one personal favourite being the electric fan played with a toothbrush. Material which in other hands might simply be a boring vision of domesticity is transformed into a compelling listening experience, one which views the past through a cracked lens. What emerges is surreal, threatening, heart-warming and touching; an unsettling take on nostalgic feelings, emotions which clearly are not to be trusted. Our golden ages are likely to turn into monstrous nightmares at the turn of a corner. The name “remnant kings” comes from a specific shop in Glasgow that sold left-over scraps of cloth, but there are many such places in the UK; for Vernon it’s another metaphor for his technique, and one that’s somehow peculiarly English (thrifty, eccentric)…”
 
Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector

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From the Cable to the Grave

Akashic Records / AKR007 (2017)

‘From the Cable to the Grave’ includes 19 new tracks featuring harmony bombs, erotic grotesque nonsense, frolicsome demon beats, stimulators of vice, confusion ciphers, faster silences, declarations of indulgence, necessary noise, abstract paradises, and excerpts from the minutes from the AGM of the Dream Prognostication Circle & Astral Radiation Trance Club.

In summary: A once in a lifetime’s clinch with gaiety.

Screen printed wrap around sleeve in 2 cover variations (lucky dip which you get). Ivory cassette. Released July 9, 2017.

Artwork by Oliver Pitt

Reviews:

“A creepy, absurd tone bleeds through, as if occupying a weird realm somewhere between a 1960s sci-fi B movie and a warped episode of 80s kids’ programme Button Moon. It gives the impression of cosmic lifeforms being passed through a supermarket checkout or maybe wired up to a beeping life support machine, as muffled ghost songs float around in the background. An out of body experience of bubbling, baffling noises.”
(Claire Sawers, The Wire Magazine)

“A deliciously bewildering journey… one rarely finds such meticulous attention to detail, such gentle and not-inappropriate humour, and such compassion for the foibles of the human race.”
(Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector)

Reviews in Full

“…Another Akashic release (the label’s name is an esoteric pun on the Sanskrit term referring to universal mystical truths) is From The Cable To The Grave, a new album by the sound art duo Vernon & Burns (Mark Vernon and Barry Burns). Chirping space creatures, watery sound effects and creepy children’s voices crossbreed across 19 tracks of oddball knob twiddling and samples. The pair set up the online and FM radio station Radiophrenia in 2015, and have also made radio plays for New Jersey’s WFMU and London’s Resonance FM. A creepy, absurd tone bleeds through, as if occupying a weird realm somewhere between a 1960s sci-fi B movie and a warped episode of 80s kids’ programme Button Moon. It gives the impression of cosmic lifeforms being passed through a supermarket checkout or maybe wired up to a beeping life support machine, as muffled ghost songs float around in the background. An out of body experience of bubbling, baffling noises.”

(Claire Sawers, The Wire Magazine)

“The team of Vernon & Burns are old TSP faves. Mark Vernon and Barry Burns have proven themselves as unique custodians of an odd method of tape assembly, drawing on their eclectic collections of highly unusual sources, and enriching the results with a decidedly low-key English humour. That’s to say nothing of their populist-absurdist view of the world and all its tedious details that mean so much to us; they’d probably lean more towards the world of Tony Hancock than Samuel Beckett, but there is a core of disenchanted whimsy to be found threaded through most of what they record and release.

Many if not all of the above characteristics can be discerned and savoured in today’s offering, a cassette tape and download called From The Cable To The Grave (AKASHIC RECORDS AKR007). That title alone neatly combines two of their interests (technology and mortality, or at least human frailty) into a neatly-filleted pun. The same abiding themes have been engrained into the 19 short tracks you will hear, a deliciously bewildering journey through the dead-end streets and back alleyways of a forgotten time in a non-existent borough of the UK, one probably lurking somewhere between the dark November fog of Wolverhampton and the dreariest suburbs of Middlesbrough. Impressions of black and white photos, faded fashions, defunct colloquialisms and now-closed services and establishments.

Vernon & Burns once again concoct a radiophonic play without words, a many-layered shifting narrative without characters, whose exact contours are diffuse and shape-shifting. This is achieved through strange electronic music, snatches of sampled voices, and a very unobtrusive editing technique. This method is one of the primary strengths of this pair; if they were film editors, they could move a character on the screen from Mars to Arabia and back again by way of the catacombs of Paris – without anyone even spotting the joins. A bittersweet experience, but as meditations on death go, one rarely finds such meticulous attention to detail, such gentle and not-inappropriate humour, and such compassion for the foibles of the human race (which is more than you might get from a philosopher or stern moralist addressing similar themes). To use their own description of this item: “excerpts from the minutes from the AGM of the Dream Prognostication Circle & Astral Radiation Trance Club.” I think that says it all. Released in one of two variant silk-screened covers.”

(Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector)

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The Light at the End of the Dial

Gagarin Records / GR2023 LP (2010)

“Vernon & Burns hark back to an earlier era of recorded sound, when novelty and comedy acts didn’t reach their use by date after five minutes of fame on the Internet, but managed to produce long-playing vinyl albums. Artefacts that subsequent generations of deejays rescued from thrift store bargain bins before cutting, scratching and manipulating them into new shapes and forms. The Light at the End of the Dial stands alongside with purveyors of a skewed form of electronica such as Stock, Hausen & Walkman, Wevie Stonder and People Like Us.

Vernon & Burns have quite an impressive oeuvre of sound making prior to this release on Felix Kubin’s Gagarin Records label. Starting out in 1999 with Radio Tuesday, an artist-run radio station in Glasgow skirting around the borders of soundscapes, documentaries, poetry and experimental music, they have moved on to enlighten and baffle such cultural institutions as WFMU, Resonance FM and the BBC with their radio plays and kitchen sink dramas.

On The Light at the End of the Dial, ‘Sinister Whimsy’ is a term that kept coming to mind. A case in point is the sad, disembodied voice of a young man that sounds uncannily like Peanuts’ Charlie Brown on Residual Values (It’s a Yes Man’s Life), “All he does is work, all he cares about is money. He doesn’t care about you, me or anyone.” Tip-tapping typewriters, the hum of a busy office, and frantic percussion seem to comment on our current obsessions without passing judgement. In Here Come The Intangibles, a free-jazz outfit stop in to unblock a sink for a distressed neighbour. The Night we Invented Forgetting comes on all loungey, with crooned evocations to a sadly absent loved one, complete with a backing of kid’s xylophone, Martin Denny textures and slamming doors.

The Last Lamppost’s beautifully eerie whistling refrain is slowly fleshed out by found sounds (creaky, of course) and a demented orchestra with only broken instruments to amuse themselves with. Spontaneous Adverse Experience Report reminds me of two grown men fighting over a game of Frogger, only to have Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic workshop join in to score the carnage. And if Vernon & Burns really are slighted lovers, no one can help them; as is evidenced by the insanely jealous psychic dis-ease of Naughty Boy.

If your tastes in comedy are dark and resolutely Britsh, and you aren’t averse to mixing that slapstick urge with a distinctly rubbery brand of cod-surrealism, The Light at the End of the Dial may be just that.”

(Oliver Laing, Cyclic Defrost)

“… mini-hörspiels: antique electronics, field recordings, sounds lifted from movies, collages slicing honky-tonk piano with old-school 8-bit video game music, nods to the golden age of musique concrète, etc. …creative madness being the unifying factor. It’s a bit messy, wild, but you can clearly hear a serious artistic process behind the mask of burlesque.
Plunderphonic cabaret concrète! Great stuff.”

(Monsieur de Lire, Journal d’écoute)

“Another delight from these Glaswegian creators whose work I unfailingly enjoy… V&B create short vignettes which are very like surreal radio plays, using fragments of spoken word, music and sound effects and putting them together in ingenious constructions. I always assume that each compacted gem of creation takes weeks of hard work to assemble, producing less than two minutes of sparkling joy, but perhaps I’m wrong. What I always enjoy is that one is never tempted to try and disaggregate their many sources, and instead enjoy these witty and eccentric pieces for what they are, with each surprising combination opening another doorway in their absurdist dolls house. One of my personal favourite moments on this album occurs on “While My Pretty One Sleeps”, where among a series of near-random dreamlike elements one suddenly hears the sound of billiard balls, apparently recorded in a pool hall in Warsaw. It’s a perfect touch, placing V&:B in 1930s Britain, wearing evening dress and sipping sherries while listening to the BBC home service. Somewhere between People Like Us and The Ghost Box label they might lie, but are not as sardonic as the former nor as specific as the other in choosing the targets of their pastiche.

On this particular release, even the packaging is in on the joke (and there aren’t that many records, outside of the early Monty Python LPs, which have pulled this off with any success); the tracks are described on the back cover, then described again on the inner sleeve; each description takes a different tack (one describes the method, the other the content) and they seem to contradict each other in the middle. Of course none of this prose is really serious, and these clipped two-line capsule descriptions (similar to TV program descriptions you may have once read on Ceefax, if you remember that) are compacted, witty and bizarre in ways that match the music. Vernon and Burns would have made ideal contributors to a TV show like Look Around You, but they would have dominated it and walked away with the prize.”

(Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector)

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Hubbub

meagre resource / mere011 CDR (2004)

An urban soundscape composition that attempts to reveal the marvellous within the everyday. This piece was made from a series of field recordings gathered in Paris on two separate trips. The overall effect is of an audio journal or travelogue without narration. In the hustle and bustle of a busy metropolis we rarely have time to focus on the sounds that surround us. Many of the most interesting and unusual sounds only became apparent in hindsight through playback of the recordings captured. The recurrence of music and musical phrases provided by busking musicians produces a cinematic quality that was deliberately exaggerated by the edits and the division of the piece into different ‘scenes.’

Hubbub was first broadcast on Resonance FM in 2004 and was selected for ‘Drift’ a festival of sound and radio art in Glasgow in 2003. It was also released as a limited edition CDR on meagre resource records.

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Involuntary Auditions for Imaginary Ensembles

meagre resource / mere019 CDR (2004)

A collection of compositions asssembled from samples recorded in musical instrument shops at weekends in Glasgow and Derby. Tuning up, squalling saxophones, musical exercises, erratic percussion, feedback, fragments of half learnt tunes, psychotic drumming, axe solo’s and cheesy pre-set keyboard demo’s all play a part in the unique ambience of the instrument shop. These sounds are playful, sometimes naive and often very unselfconscious as there is no intended audience – there’s always the odd show-off though. The recordings have been combined and rearranged – used as source material to create imaginary bands and groups. Through this process many unwitting musicians have become involved in unlikely collaborations with one another.

This piece was first aired on Resonance FM’s Clear Spot in 2004. It was also released as a limited edition CDR run of 20 copies on meagre resource records.

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Thirteenth Colony Sound

meagre resource / mere020 CDR (2005)

This piece was composed from field recordings made in Savannah, Georgia in the summer of 2004. Different ‘species’ of sounds were grouped into ‘families’; resonant metallic sounds, engines and machines, bangs, intermittent repetitive strikes, constant broadband noise, etc. These sounds with superficial similarities were then processed, blended and carefully interwoven to create the final piece. Although many sounds are still recognizable, the fusion of sound sources blur the listeners ability to distinguish between specific components whilst amplifying and hybridizing some of their common characteristics. I looked on the process as a way of ‘breeding’ new sounds.

Released as a limited CDR edition of 50 copies on meagre resource records in 2005.

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Notes on a Re-run

meagre resource / mere022 CDR (2005)

This piece was completed during a residency at Recyclart in 2005, a multi-functional arts space and venue in Brussels. The majority of the complex is situated beneath the arches of an active train station. As well as housing artists studios, gallery spaces, a cafe, wood and metal workshops, offices and a skate park, it is also a music venue that hosts gigs and club nights. The work was designed to play over the 6-speaker stereo system installed in the pedestrian subway that leads to the train platforms. By a series of sliding interlocking doors a modular space can be created in the subway. The same tiled floor that busy commuters rush over to get to work in the week becomes a dance floor for clubbers at weekends. I made it my goal to integrate as many aspects of this busy, versatile space as possible into the final work. Sounds collected range from the clatter of skateboards, spray cans and the rumble of trains to church bells, clubbers at night-time, construction work and fictional news stories from local children.

All recordings made by Mark Vernon at Recyclart, Brussels, Belgium, April to May 2005.

The piece was originally presented as a sound installation for ‘Kleur Station Couleur’ an exhibition curated by Komplot. ‘Notes on a re-run’ was aired on Radio Panik, Brussels and Resonance FM, London in 2006 and during ASCR’s Radiophonic Festival in 2007. An extract also appears on ‘Vollevox: Voice in Contemporary Art’, a book and double CD produced by Komplot. The recordings are also gathered together as a limited edition CDR on meagre resource records.

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Found Sound Bulletin #1

Originally conceived as a synchronized sound composition designed to be played simultaneously on audio-cassette tape and compact disc, the Found Sound Bulletin is an archive of lost voices, audio letters, home sing-alongs and phone conversations created for the Art Lending Library as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art in 2012.

Drawn from a collection of found recordings unearthed from many years of sifting through car boot sales, second hand shops and flea markets, this compilation allows a brief glimpse into the everyday lives of others. These discarded recordings, rescued from the sea of cultural flotsam & jetsam are windows on another world, inadvertently captured for posterity on magnetic tape.

The piece was designed as a listening experience in two parts. Some recordings had previously been edited, arranged and mixed with sound effects and music to create a type of radiophonic micro-drama. For this edition these carefully composed sound pieces were prised apart and the voice elements put back onto cassette, allowing the listener to experience them as they were first discovered – on magnetic tape. The composed elements were compiled on accompanying CD. Following the spoken instructions on the tape the user could synchronise playback of these disparate elements for a unique listening experience.

Separating the compositions into their constituent parts throws into contrast the low-grade audio of the taped voices and the comparative high fidelity of the musical backdrops. It also serves to highlight the gulf between analogue and digital, found and composed material.

This piece was re-imagined as a radio broadcast for Resonance 104.4 FM in 2013 as part of the series ‘Data for the Doubtful’.

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