Category: News

On Saturday, 4th October from 4 – 6pm Mark Vernon will be presenting a 2-hour show on WGXC 90.7FM which will include the preview of  the his new broadcast work ‘Audiology for Beginners’. The programme is a playful look at the idea of an over the air hearing test and all that this might entail. This broadcast is the culmination of a short residency at the Wave Farm study centre which is situated in the Northern foothills of the Catskill Mountain Park, New York state.

Saturday, 4th October, 16.00 – 18.00 (21.00 – 23.00 GMT)

Tune in on: WGXC 90.7 FM in the Greene and Columbia counties.

To listen live online follow the instructions here

Supported by Creative Scotland.

The Dividing Line (2014) – an outdoor film screening as part of the It’s All About the River film festival.

Barne Barton, Bull Point Rugby Field
7.00pm, Thursday, 2nd October, 2014.
Free entry
(45 mins)

Commissioned in collaboration with socially engaged art programme Take A Part The Dividing Line is a portrait of a specific riverside community and their complex historical ties with the Navy. Barne Barton is a former MOD housing estate: a community suffering from high deprivation, isolated from the rest of Plymouth and cut off from the river by the naval base and MOD owned shoreline. In The Dividing Line, Glasgow based sound artist, Mark Vernon, uses the voices of those living in the area, archive film and spectacular aerial footage of the Tamar to explore these issues. The film celebrates the people, community spirit, green spaces and naval heritage of a remarkably situated housing estate.

Also screening as part of this event is Launch, by the Amber Collective, featuring classic archive material from the Newcastle docks.

The screening of The Dividing Line will be preceded by a debate exploring the issues raised by the film.

The Dividing Line (2014) – a film by Mark Vernon – is commissioned by the River Tamar Project and Take-A-Part. It was made from archive footage sourced from the South West Film and Television Archive with editing and additional footage shot by James Ellwood of Fotonow.

Remote Performances: radio art broadcasts from Outlandia

Remote Performances is a collaboration between artists London Fieldworks and Resonance104.4fm, the world’s first art radio station. For one week in August 2014, 20 specially commissioned artist performances and programmes created with local residents will be broadcast live from Outlandia, a unique artists’ field-station in Glen Nevis, Lochaber, Scotland – which provide a timely reflection on contemporary ideas of remoteness, capturing and transmitting creative interactions with the land, its history and people and the tensions between nature, industry, tourism and heritage.

Artists: Bram Thomas Arnold | Atlas Arts | Ruth Barker | Ed Baxter (with Resonance Radio Orchestra) | Johny Brown (with Inga Tillere and James Stephen Finn) | Clair Chinnery | Adam Dant | Tam Dean Burn | Benedict Drew | Alec Finlay (with Ken Cockburn) | Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson | Kirsteen Davidson Kelly |Sarah Kenchington | Lisa O’Brien | Lee Patterson | Michael Pedersen (with Ziggy Campbell) | Geoff Sample | Mark Vernon | Parl Kristian Bjorn Vester (aka Goodiepal) | Tracey Warr | Tony White

Broadcasting on Resonance 104.4FM, August 4th-9th, 2014, 12-4pm.

The Sound of Lochaber is a six-part series on Resonance FM for Remote Performances produced by Mark Vernon and London Fieldworks. The series is broadcast daily at 12pm from the Outlandia studio in the foothills of Ben Nevis.

To catch up with previous episodes of The Sound of Lochaber you can listen here:

Episode 1: The Gathering

Episode 2: The Angel’s Share

Episode 3: Highland Games

Episode 4: Songlines

Episode 5: The Jacobite

Episode 6: Distillation

Supported by Creative Scotland.

For the Tectonics 2014 festival in Glasgow, Vernon & Burns present a radiophonic, found sound, micro-drama they describe as ‘CPR’ (Cardio-Pulmonary Radiophonics) – a composition for Fetal Doppler, CPR training aid and found tape. The performance takes place on the evening of Friday, 9th May with the festival continuing over the rest of the weekend at the City Halls and Fruitmarket.

Condition: not serious, unstable.

7.30pm, Friday 9th May, 2014.
Tectonics festival, St. Andrews in the Square, Glasgow.

New for 2014, a weekly slot for long-form one-offs and irregular special broadcasts on Resonance 104.4FM

‘Things That Were Missed in the Clamour for Calm’: a soundscape composed from field recordings made in Sri Lanka between October and December 2013. Produced by Mark Vernon.

Broadcast: 8pm – 9.30pm, Saturday, 12th April, 2014.

Repeat: 1.30am – 3am, Monday 14th April, 2014

Tune in to Resonance 104.4FM or follow the live stream online.

The show has now been archived here

Mark Vernon is a sound artist and composer who has been working with visual effects artist Loday Gonpo to create Sound Test 5.1, a short sound film commissioned by Pixel Palace for Tyneside Cinema’s auditoria. Since the end of February the film has been playing before main features unannounced, inserted guerrilla style after the trailers.

A playful riff on the standard speaker tests that cinema projectionists use to check that the surround sound is operating correctly, the film explores the mechanics of the 5.1 surround sound system and how it operates within the cinema auditorium. The rich electronic soundtrack in the style of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop is combined with Loday’s beautiful motion graphics that are designed to reflect on the screen how the sound moves through the space.

By drawing attention to speaker locations within the auditorium and exposing how the surround sound image is created, Sound Test 5.1 reveals a little of the magic that goes into the cinema experience.

There are two upcoming launch events to mark the release of the new vinyl LP record ‘Sounds of the Modern Hospital’.

‘Sounds of the Modern Hospital’ is a long-playing sound effects record in a limited edition of 250 copies produced by digital artist in residence at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Mark Vernon. For these special launch events Mark will perform a live mix of sounds and voices recorded in different NHS hospital departments over the course of his residency additionally incorporating a live ultrasound feed of his own heartbeat.

Also on display will be an edition of 20 unique lathe-cut X-ray records displayed on light boxes. Inspired by Russian “roentgenizdat” records from the 1950’s (home made bootlegs of banned Western pop music that were pressed onto discarded X-rays) – these playable 7” records each feature a different X-ray image and a composed sound piece made from recordings taken in Forth Valley Royal’s radiology department.

A limited number of records will be given away free at each event. All welcome.

Launch 1: Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Larbert
3-4pm, Saturday 22nd February, 2014 (performance approximately 3.30pm)
Lecture Theatre, Learning Centre, 3rd Floor

Launch 2: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
7-8pm, Wednesday 26th February, 2014 (performance approximately 7.30pm)
CCA Club Room, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow

The record can also be purchased  here

Supported by Creative Scotland, NHS Forth Valley and CCA Glasgow.