meagre resource productions
A rampaging, radiophonic phantasmagoria of nefarious four-colour fear.
Originating as a live performance at the Poetry Club in Glasgow this studio version was broadcast as part of the ‘Vernon & Burns Hour’ on Resonance FM in 2016. Subsequently it has been aired on Wave Farm, Radio Revolten and Radiophrenia.
Vernon & Burns, thinking aloud, offer a quiet meditation on noise. Extracts from interviews with noise pollution officers from Dundee City Council’s Environmental Health Department are combined with found sounds, songs, field recordings and other voices to create this experimental live radio piece. Part audio collage, part documentary this is an unorthodox investigation into attitudes towards extraneous noise and noise pollution.
Commissioned by Extrapool (NL) in 2005 for ‘Audiotoop’ – an evening of live, performed radio plays and Hörspiel. The full programme was aired on Resonance FM in June 2008. A condensed version appears on ‘Play’, a CD and publication produced by Extrapool, 2006:
http://www.kormplastics.nl/Audiotoop.html
“When the devil pulls the strings, all the world must dance…”
Constructing an episodic narrative from silent movie intertitles, Vernon and Burns translate grand melodramatic gestures and deadpan pratfall pantomime into the audio realm. Hand-tinted frames of sound, under-cranked audio slapstick and sepia-soaked expressionism for the ear are projected onto the cinema screen of the mind’s eye.
This programme was commissioned by WORM and was produced during a residency at WORM studios, Rotterdam. It was performed live as part of ‘Popular Noise for the Masses’ at WORM, March 2010. The narrator was Giles Bailey.
First aired on Cafe Sonore, VPRO Radio 6, June 12th 2010. Subsequent broadcasts on Resonance 104.4 FM, 2011.
A studio version of a live radiophonic work produced by Vernon & Burns, commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow in 2012. The piece explores the internal space of the subconscious and the logic of dreams. Part documentary, part experimental radio play, it features readings from Barry Burns’ dream diary intermingled with interviews about people’s dreams and sleeping habits set to an accompaniment of sound effects and music.
“I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams… Man… is above all the plaything of his memory.”
André Breton
The piece was originally performed on two consecutive nights in October 2012 as part of a triple bill of performances with Lisbeth Gruwez / Voetvolk and Zoe Irvine & Pippa Murphy. The radio version has been aired on Resonance 104.4FM, Basic FM and Soundart Radio.
Shadazz Records / SHA011 LP (2011)
Lost Lake sees the return of the collaborative project between sound art duo Vernon &: Burns (Mark Vernon and Barry Burns) and Lied Music (Luke Fowler and John W Fail). It is a sequel to the long-sold out LP Lied Music vs.Boy-Band Tax Returns (released on Ultra Eczema, 2006). This LP merges musique concrète compositional approaches with absurdist improvisational strategies. The four artists met in Glasgow where they recorded a series of sporadic improvised sessions using a diverse array of sound-making instruments (amplified toys and objects, guitar, analogue synths, percussion, squeeze box, field recordings and found tapes). Improvised sessions from 2008 were subsequently manipulated, tortured and caressed, both individually and collectively, into a series of highly idiosyncratic song-forms and sound collages.
Limited edition of 300 vinyl LPs. Screen-printed artwork by Corin Sworn.
Reviews:
“The latest entry in the Vernon & Burns catalogue sees this Glasgow duo teaming up with Lied Music, the duo of Luke Fowler and John W. Fail. Lost Lake (SHADAZZ SHA.11) is one of the stranger and darker emissions from these talented creatives, particularly if you care to compare it with the sometimes more playful assemblages of V&B, or the deliciously offbeat melodic avant-pop tunes created by Fowler as part of Rude Pravo. At first spin the record is a near-bewildering toasted-cheese sandwich, a concoction which contains at least a zillion ideas apparently thrown together any which way. Faced with such an array, discerning avant-LP listeners may want to reach for The Faust Tapes as one touchstone, but another credible precedent is the unearthly Bladder Flask LP 1, that ne plus ultra of cut-up sound art put together by a teenaged Richard Rupenus as if possessed by some fevered desire to surpass the worst excesses of the lunatic fringe end of the United Dairies catalogue. But the Bladder Flask release had the underlying sinister aim of sending all those who heard it mad, through highlighting the complete absurdity and futility of everything.
Lost Lake has a more benign mission, thankfully. The album has been very carefully crafted, using sets of recorded improvisation sessions produced by the four players, aiming to resculpt the near-chaos of that source material into a coherent structure. Within that structure, fractured songs and equally fractured stories emerge; yes, a scrambled form of a radio listening or cinematic experience, which is an effect Vernon & Burns have striven for with a good deal of their work (and have produced many items expressly in radiophonic mode). As to the cinematic, Fowler is also a film-maker. There is a logic to this scheme, but it is hard to follow and weaves its way around in a highly secretive and intuitive fashion, like an errant underground stream full of eccentric fish and darting river-insects stained in unnatural colours. We could account for some of this quirkiness by pointing out that all four creators were involved in the refashioning process, rather than a single editorial hand behind the editing knife; one can imagine the clashing dynamism generated by four powerful personalities, each of them bending the path of events in their favour. Additionally, the source material itself was not exactly straightforward music to begin with, but created using the now-virtually-standard set-up of the modern improviser, that is amplified instruments, toys, found tapes, field recordings, and live electronics. From this rich stew, voices and tunes emerge from amid a varispeeded and highly layered humid aggregation of extremely strange sounds. And yes, like the Rupenus LP, it is quite absurdist, but I like to think it’s a fun and cartoony absurdity, rather than bleak and Beckett-like. That said, this aural bric-a-brac crawls out from a dark attic of the mind, and is as much an unsettling listen as it is entertaining.
Corin Sworn’s cover art encodes all the above information quite perfectly. Using collage technique (naturally), it depicts a figure sitting on a sofa surrounded by hideously “tasteful” drapes and furnishings. This image of bourgeois normality is thoroughly disrupted by replacing the outline of the figure with fragments of urban horror and machinery, then further scrambling the visual schema with concentric rings and diagonal bars, suggesting the power of the aural emanations on the record. The album is, we are told, a sequel to a 2006 release called Lied Music vs Boy-Band Tax Returns, which we reviewed in our Vinyl Viands issue.”
(Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector, December 15, 2012)
“One of the great things about writing for Cyclic Defrost is the exposure to music that just wouldn’t get a look-in, with the congested world that is my listening habits, any other way. Vernon &: Burns were one such musical proposition, prior to getting intimately acquainted with their Light at the End of the Dial release from last year. Dark and resolutely dada, with a inscrutable British-ness about their sound collages, the duo are joined on Lost Lake by Luke Fowler and John W. Fail from Lied Music. Following on from 2006’s amusingly titled Lied Music Vs Boy Band Tax Returns, the duos reunite for a further round of concrete-based antics.
There’s a sinister whimsy, full of squeaky, overdriven instruments and radio static emerging from the Lost Lake. It’s as if the entire INA-GRM catalogue has been submerged in a neglected, overgrown wetland and allowed to infuse with the recorded works of Nurse With Wound and Stock, Hausen &: Walkman. The cover-art for this limited vinyl release is suitably warped – a comfy living room, complete with lace curtains and needlework cushions, yet the reclining inhabitant has been replaced by a montage of oil tanks, circles and a refinery infrastructure, whilst retaining the silhouette. While this is not a startling technique in itself (check the Not Not Fun label or Sun Araw releases for a similar aesthetic), it’s executed in a manner that compliments the sounds contained within admirably.
There’s a spooked miasma smelling of half –remembered 78s, 101 Strings records (and the kitchen sink) on ‘Death knell for short-handed typists’. ‘Perpendicular to Love’ is a three-minute naive ode to love, delivered in a slightly threatening, yet whimsical fashion. What does ‘Perpendicular to Love’ mean? Separate from, but relating to love, or completely divorced from such intricacies of the heart? Side B, entitled “Chamber Game of the Skies” starts off with ‘Digging Runner of the Den’ a confused and baffling journey through electroacoustic improvisation. Imagine Keiji Heino jamming with a bunch of Tibetan monks with access to an expansive array of analogue studio equipment. ‘Black Mint’s blunted slo-mo tabla rhythms and soaring cello switches half-way through into something altogether more lopsided, as vocal snippets, clattering percussion and a malfunctioning string section vie to be first across the line.
Lost Lake is a haunted juxtaposition of faux-jazz and Delia Derbyshire meets AMM electronic bafflement. Vernon &: Burns and Lied Music’s musique concrète approach could even be an appropriate accompaniment to your next dinner party, just make sure you spike the aperitifs with something stronger than usual.”
(Oliver Laing, Cyclic Defrost, June 22, 2011)
“Madness is in my pile today. First Bjork, then this pile of concrète crazypie. At least I didn’t get the bicycle-driven thing as well, that would have flipped my wig. Apparently these two are from the arena of radiophonics/plunderphonics. I’m unsure where this record should be lodged as it sounds like it’s largely from that demented pasture but it seems to occasionally like chatting in the little drone and free jazz/improv yard next door. Once in a blue moon they even go for a brief piss in the field recordings barn. There’s some utterly fantastic stuff on here. Expertly stitched audio collage, gibbering toy-town pop and clever aural goonery. Scary manipulated voices mingle with Moondog style percussion, bleak haunted house synths are tormented by digital cricket echoes, some wonky Pete Um/Ergo Phizmiz-style balladeering is roundly assaulted by these bursts of vicious spluttering fuzz and a loud bang that made me shit myself a bit. I flip over and from the seeds of more clattering, belching rumbling improv grows a massive gurgling, stumbling analogue noise bush. This bush grows wheels, shifts into a kranky gear and proceeds to swerve drunkenly down the road knocking over three mechanical cats and squashing a blind hedgehog made out of old aluminium tins. There’s not a normal moment on this bloody interesting album but for unabashed lovers of abstract ephemera and plain weird experimental records this really is the tip-tops. I really can’t recommend it enough and you know you’re getting top drawer material when you realise these nutters had the most elaborate and impractical packaging on their Mort Aux Vaches CD, a series commissioned for only the most hardy and respected of out-there sound artists and musicians.”
(Four stars …according to our Brian on 27 July 2011, Norman Records)
Gagarin Records / GR2012 LP (2005)
Vernon & Burns debut album proper on Felix Kubin’s Gagarin Records. Limited edition of 350 copies. Screen printed cover designed by MIK.thesign – Polish handcraft in disharmonic order.
“With its modernistic abstract sleeve design that looks like a computer printer malfunctioning, this one certainly comes across as a bit of an oddity, but turns out to be a good example of well-crafted tape-work and sound art. Vernon and Burns are a team based in Glasgow, and both of them have been involved in radio work. (Also it seems that they perform as Boy Band Tax Returns, whatever sort of project that may be). Here they use spliced tapes, documentary recordings, found materials and allsorts, and quietly assemble a very charming and beguiling set of pieces.
What really gives them the edge over so many records of this ilk is that V & B have a great sense of humour and fun. This record shows it is possible to work in the cut-up mode without needing to resort to obscene jokes or infantile frat-boy humour. Since I’ve heard so many records recently spewed forth from the USA shock-jock mentality of Broken Penis Orchestra and others of a similar adolescent mentality, its extremely refreshing to find something so much more subtle and informed by a dry wit. Vernon and Burns are not trying to be ‘shocking’ or ‘ironic’, even when they use childrens’ records or old educational tapes from forgotten sources. They have some great sounds, strong ideas about juxtaposition, and use them in a very winning way. At times it may come across as the work of two BBC staffers having a bit of fun with tapes from the radio archive, but then perhaps that’s very close to what it is. Their unassuming stance grows on you, keeps you listening. Whilst not setting themselves up as ‘proper’ experimenters along the order of Luc Ferrari or Bernard Parmegiani, this duo can often be more bold or daring than any establishment electro-acoustic musician.”
(Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector)
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)
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)
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)
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)