‘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

+

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

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.

Live at The Old Hairdressers

I will be performing a new set as part an excellent triple bill at the Old Hairdressers in Glasgow this Saturday evening. Also playing will be Yorkshire based composer and sound artist Kirk Barely and improvising cellist and sound artist Semay Wu. For this one I will be delving deep into my found tape archives of karaoke and home singalongs.

The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow.
8pm, Saturday, 18th November.

Tickets £10 – available from here.

Golden Cassette – out now

 
“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.” Jimmy Carter, président des États-Unis, 1977.

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.

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.

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