News

Posted on

Mal de Débarquement – Cassette & download out now

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.

Posted on

Call Back Carousel – new album out now

 

My latest album is out now on Discrepant as a limited edition LP or download. You can purchase copies direct from the label here.

“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.

 

Posted on

Oscillation ::: o tempo

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.

Time Deterred

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.

Posted on

VICE DE FORME #11 – Instants Chavirés

VICE DE FORME #11
CARBON SINK
LORENZO ABATTOIR
MARK VERNON

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.

Posted on

Formosa Launch at the Old Hairdressers

ADAM MATSCHULAT – FORMOSA ALBUM LAUNCH + MARK VERNON + OLIVER PITT (DJ SET)

On Friday night I’ll be performing a live quadraphonic set as part of a Calling Cards Publishing night to mark the launch of Adam Matschulat’s new LP Formosa.

Adam will also be performing a quad set on the night and Akashic records’ Oliver Pitt will be DJing.

The Old Hairdressers, Renfield Lane, Glasgow
Friday, 31st March from 8pm
 
Tickets in advance £8 – £10

Posted on

SONOHR

SONOHR RADIO & PODCAST FESTIVAL

24th – 26th February, 2023, Bern, Switzerland.

Tickets available here.

“The SONOHR Festival is a three-day celebration of creative documentary and fictional audio stories that are rich in sound, and an event which also allows for an active exchange between authors and the audience. We offer the unique experience of enjoying thrilling radio dramas, intriguing documentaries, experimental sound art or interactive audiowalks together with friends and like-minded people in high-quality sound and in the comfortable setting of a cinema.

Our selection includes a national competition as well as outstanding and innovative audio creations from around the world. The side program offers opportunities to various forms of listening and discusses new developments in the field.”

On the 24th February I am excited to present a live version of ‘Call Back Carousel’ – the debut outing of this new project:

CALL BACK CAROUSEL
Friday, 24th February, 21.30, Kino Rex, Bern.

Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slide-show 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.

For SONOHR Mark Vernon presents three episodes of Call Back Carousel – each episode is based on a different 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 Mark Vernon’s own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that he has been collecting over the past twenty years.

And on the Sunday I will be doing a presentation on my work relating to audio archaeology and found sounds:

EAR LESSON 5: AUDIO ARCHAEOLOGY
Sunday, 26th February, 11.45am, Lichtspiel, Bern.

In his presentation Mark Vernon explores the world of audio archaeology, magnetic memory, lost voices and found sounds through the lens of his practice as a sound artist. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the reappropriation of found recordings. A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, answer-phone messages and other lost voices often find their way into his unorthodox soundworlds and these diverse elements are distilled into radiophonic compositions.

Posted on

Navel Gazers

NAVEL GAZING III

The digital compilation album Navel Gazing III was released last month. It gathers together contributions from a number of artists interviewed by Andrew Ciccone for his Navel Gazers blog (including myself).

The compilation features loads of great artists including Graham Lambkin and Reynols amongst many others. All proceeds go to the Mind charity for mental health so you’d also be supporting a good cause.

Buy your copy here.

Posted on

Essential Blends

Back in December I was pleased to have been interviewed by Adriana Minu for the Essential Blends podcast. The interview covers many different areas of my arts practice including how I got involved with radio, working with found tapes and the origins of how I first began working with sound.

The podcast episode is now available online here.

Essential Blends is a podcast created by University of Glasgow music researchers Adriana Minu and Kevin Leomo. The podcast aims to bring forward other artist practitioners from various disciplines, both within and outwith academia, in order to uncover some possibilities of practice that others might find inspiring in a conversational and informal format.

Posted on

Sitting in a Room (Because of Covid 19)

In April 2020, Yanik Miossec et Jérôme Noetinger invited 20 artists, among the twenty countries most affected by the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (in terms of number of contaminations as of March 31, 2020) to participate in an interpretation of the Alvin Lucier composition, ‘I am sitting in a room’. Sitting in 20 different rooms in 20 different countries, 20 artists recorded their own voices and then re-re-recorded the voices of each of the other so that by the end of the process everyone’s voice had passed through the rooms of each other. Under lockdown conditions it was proposed as a means of contaminating speech without risking our health.

After almost two years this lockdown interpretation of the classic Alvin Lucier piece is now available online.

Sitting In a Room (Because of Covid 19) is a “pay as you wish” Bandcamp release with all proceeds going to French charity ‘Secours Populaire’ – an organisation helping people in need of food, clothes and education.

Participants:
Nicolas Collins, Maria Auriemma, Yan Jun, Marta Sainz, Andrea Neumann, Anne-Julie Rollet, Bani Khoshnoudi, Mark Vernon, Delphine Reist, Hankil Ryu, Frans de Waard, Angelica Castello, Floris Wanhoof, Eda Er, Eric Normand, David Maranha, Guroe Moe, Miyuki Jokiranta, Claudia Mader, Eran Sachs.

You can listen or download the individual pieces or the whole project here.

Posted on

Recomposing the World

Last month saw the publication of the longest interview I’ve ever given courtesy of the good folks at ‘Fifteen Questions’. The format for each guest is a series of 15 set questions.

You can read this epic in depth interview online here.

Fifteen Questions is an online music magazine about music itself. By talking to some of the leading artists of our time about their perspectives, processes and approaches, we aim at building an extensive archive documenting one of music’s most turbulent and exciting eras.

Top