Category: solo

“Similar situations occur, even recur frequently, in the artistic communities around us. A film or theatre production, as we know, requires a soundtrack. This is the perfect moment when a musician or composer must grapple not only with their imagination but also with certain top-down priorities established by the director or script of the work in progress. And this is where “chance” comes into play, causing the entire endeavor to fail. Despite a completed soundtrack or work on it, the film is never made, never completed.

A soundtrack either ends up on the artist’s archive shelf or appears as “lost and unused” audio material. Another possibility is to retrieve set-aside recordings and give them new life—either by referencing their original context or by using them in a completely different way.

In between all this comes A Yellow Minute – a new title in the phonography of Mark Vernon, an artist working with sounds found on tapes, field recordings created with the help of primitive electronics, transforming them into his own acousmatic audio world.

Originally intended as a soundtrack for a horror film that never materialized. Although recorded over a decade ago, time has not taken its toll – there’s no loss of quality in these backing tracks, fragments, or loops. Pulled from the past, revived, and enriched with “contemporary” additions, combined with Vernon’s expansive imagination, the result is A Yellow Minute.

An elegantly composed, forty-minute journey (divided into 11 parts) into the darkened recesses of the self, not far removed from the original premise of this material. It’s like coming face to face with inner, imagined insecurities—or perhaps “half-nightmares”—which are here visualized in the form of sound. It’s incredible how directly they assert their presence in the stereo spectrum—a certain personality that imbues the whole thing with a strange aura of uncanniness. It’s not fear, though some might call it that, but rather an invitation to exploration, a personal confrontation.

The opening minutes of the album greet you with dissonant feedback and hushed terrain sounds from an uncertain distance, and the whole thing begins to play as if played backwards—anything could happen. The low, hypnotic purr of a cat trying to catch drops of falling water and its owner humming something under her breath startle you—the tension mounts, amplified by circling, spectral drones.

Mark used “bottled feedback”—feedback generated by bottles—as one of his recording methods, and he did it brilliantly. Just listen to the second half of “A Discrete Diaspora of Mold,” where the drinking sound we hear comes not from outside but from inside the container—our gray matter is scattered by the overload of stimuli.

A visible, and at times even highlighted, element of A Yellow Minute is the author’s use of what sounds particularly apt in English: “crude electronics.” Yes, all those raw, analog twists and turns, oscillator-like processes—they break out of space. Devoid of reverberations and echoes, they exude their power here and now, adding an electric edge to the whole.

The ubiquitous field recordings themselves don’t just recreate the surroundings, but also reproduce sounds heard in the house, kitchen, and immediate surroundings, appearing suddenly, heightening the ever-increasing atmosphere. The whole thing takes on a strange narrative, a slow-motion action that unfolds at its own pace all around us.

By introducing the element of the human voice, Mark adds another layer to this story – The Animal Whose Ear It Is begins with the recorded breathing of a running man, or perhaps fleeing from something. Yes, that dune glow that seeps around.

And “A Yellow Minute” isn’t our protagonist’s first foray into film music. His work with sound, broadly defined, encompasses record releases and radio work, and he’s already touched upon film, composing soundtracks for example, for ” Tape Letters from the Waiting Room .” It’s no surprise, then, that this latest release reeks of film soundtracks, even though it is not entirely one. It only proves how versatile and freely he moves in the realm of audio, telling us paranormal tales, as in the short “Rinsing the Bones.” The analogue squiggle around his neck is a witness, I don’t know if it’s the sound of chopping wood or something else, accompanied by a terrified woman sighing, trying to catch her breath. The pounding on the door and those slashes in the air, like blows being delivered… someone slams the door, leaving the room. The spectral, slightly suffocating electronics, reminiscent of Andrew Liles’s best, early releases, are very much in place here. Its subdued sound, and the sparkling frequencies at the edges, only add to the supernatural effect. It’s truly worthwhile to compose such “soundtracks” without actual visuals; your imagination will reward you.”

Marek “Lokis” Nawrot, Anxious Magazine (translated from the original Polish).

“Podobne sytuacje zdarzają się, wręcz  powtarzają nagminnie w otaczających nas środowiskach artystycznych. Powstający film czy przedstawienie teatralne jak wiadomo potrzebuje oprawy dźwiękowej tzw. soundtracku. Jest to doskonały moment, w którym muzyk, kompozytor musi zmierzyć się, nie tylko z wyobraźnią, ale i z pewnymi odgórnie narzuconymi priorytetami ustanowionymi przez reżysera, czy scenariusz powstającego dzieła. I tutaj wkracza do akcji „przypadek losowy”, który powoduje, że całe przedsięwzięcie spala na panewce. Pomimo gotowego soundtracku czy pracy nad nim, film nigdy nie powstaje, nigdy nie zostaje ukończony.

Ścieżka dźwiękowa albo trafia na archiwalną półkę artysty, albo ukazuje się jako „stracony i niewykorzystany” materiał audio. Inną możliwością jest sięgnięcie po odłożone nagrania i nadanie im nowego życia – czy to w nawiązaniu do oryginalnego kontekstu, czy poprzez wykorzystanie ich w zupełnie inny sposób.
Pomiędzy tym wszystkim pojawia się A Yello Minute – nowy tytuł w fonografii Marka Vernona, artysty pracującego z dźwiękami znalezionymi na taśmach, terenowymi nagraniami, powstałymi przy pomocy prymitywnej elektroniki, transformujących je we własny akusmatyczny świat audio.

Oryginalnie przeznaczony jako soundtrack do horroru, który nigdy nie powstał. Choć nagrania i rejestracja odbyły się ponad dziesięć lat temu, czas nie odcisnął na nich piętna – nie ma tu mowy o utracie jakości tych podkładów, fragmentów czy pętli. Wyciągnięte z przeszłości, ożywione na nowo i wzbogacone o „współczesne” dodatki, w połączeniu z ekspansywną wyobraźnią, którą Vernon niejednokrotnie już nas zaskakiwał – dają efekt w postaci A Yello Minute.

Elegancko skomponowana, czterdziestominutowa przejażdżka (podzielona na 11 części) w głąb przyciemnionych zakątków jaźni, nieodbiegająca zbytnio od pierwotnego założenia tego materiału. Jakby stawanie twarzą w twarz z wewnętrznymi, wyimaginowanymi niepewnościami – czy może „półkoszmarami” – które tutaj zostają zwizualizowane w postaci dźwięku. Niesamowite jest to, jak bezpośrednio zaznaczają swoją obecność w spektrum stereo – pewna osobowość, która nadaje całości przedziwną aurę niesamowitości. Nie jest to strach, choć niektórzy mogliby tak to nazwać, lecz raczej zachęta do eksploracji, osobistej konfrontacji.

Otwierające minuty wydawnictwa witają cię dysonansowym sprzężeniem i przyciszonymi odgłosami terenowymi dobiegającymi z niepewnej oddali, a ogół zaczyna odtwarzać się niczym puszczony od tyłu – wszystko może się zdarzyć. Zaskakuje niskie, hipnotyczne mruczenie kota, który próbuje złapać krople spadającej wody, oraz jego właścicielkę, podśpiewującą coś pod nosem — napięcie rośnie, wzmacniane krążącymi, widmowymi dronami. 
Jako jedną z metod rejestracji materiału Mark wykorzystał “bottled feedback” – sprzężenie zwrotne generowane z użyciem butelek – i zrobił to w sposób fantastyczny. Posłuchajcie choćby drugiej połowy A Discrete Diaspora of Mould, kiedy dźwięk picia, który słyszymy, dochodzi nie z zewnątrz, lecz z wnętrza naczynia – szare komórki rozbiegają się z nadmiaru bodźców.

Widocznym, a momentami wręcz uwypuklonym elementem A Yello Minute jest sięgnięcie przez autora po to, co po angielsku brzmi wyjątkowo trafnie: “crude electronics”. Tak, te wszystkie surowe, analogowe zakrętasy, oscylatorowe pochody — wyłamują się z przestrzeni. Pozbawione pogłosów i echa, emanują swoją mocą tu i teraz, dodając elektryczności do całości.

Same, wszechobecne, nagrania terenowe nie kończą się tylko na odtworzeniu otoczenia, ale i również reprodukują odgłosy słyszane w domu, kuchni, najbliższym otoczeniu, pojawiając się znienacka, podkręcając wciąż narastająca atmosferę. Całość nabiera przedziwnej narracji, spowolnionej akcji, która w swoim tempie rozgrywa się dookoła nas.
Wprowadzając element głosu ludzkiego Mark dobudowuje kolejny poziom w tej opowieści – The Animal Whose Ear It Is toczy swój początek od zarejestrowanego oddechu biegnącego mężczyzny, czy może uciekającym przed czymś. Tak tej wydmowej poświaty, która sączy się dookoła.

A Yello Minute nie jest pierwszym spotkaniem naszego bohatera z muzyka filmową. Jego praca z szeroko rozumianym dźwiękiem obejmuje wydawnictwa płytowe i działalność radiową, a z filmem spotkał się już wcześniej, przygotowując soundtrack np. do Tape Letters from the Waiting Room. Nic więc dziwnego, że najnowsza pozycja pachnie podkładem filmowym, choć tak do końca nim nie jest. Udowadnia tylko jak wszechstronnie i swobodnie przemieszcza się w krainie audio opowiadając nam paranormalne nowele, tak jak w krótkim Rinsing the Bones. Zaciskający pętle na szyi analogowy zakrętas jest świadkiem, nie wiem, czy to odgłos rąbanego drewna, czy czegoś innego w towarzystwie przeraźliwie wystraszonej kobiety, wzdychającej, próbującej złapać oddech. Dobijanie się do drzwi i te cięcia w powietrzu, jak zadawane ciosy… ktoś trzaska drzwiami opuszczając pomieszczenie. Spektralna, lekko dusząca  elektronika, która przypomina najlepsze, wczesne wydawnictwa Andrew Lilesa jest tu bardzo na miejscu. Jej przygaszone brzmienie, a iskrzące się na krawędziach częstotliwości dodają tylko nadnaturalnego efektu. Naprawdę warto komponować takie “soundtracki” bez faktycznego obrazu, wyobraźnia ci to wynagrodzi.”

“Mark Vernon goes to extreme lengths to damage his own tapes for his Magneto Mori series. First, he combines them in a box with magnets that erase random portions. Then, he buries them for days. The first two installments subjected recordings from Kilfinane, Ireland and Vienna, Austria to this artificial distress. Now, he has asked residents of Brussels, Belgium to describe their earliest childhood memories and treated the results in the same way. The first sound we hear is Vernon’s shovel recovering the buried recordings. Then, disembodied voices cut in and out, telling stories that never quite reach their conclusion. Sounds of the city interrupt its inhabitants like a specter arising from their recollections. The result is eerie, foreboding, and captivating, perfectly summarized by the testimony of one contributor: “The Brussels I knew from my own childhood was a different city from this. It was dark and lonely, and full of ghosts and unspoken threats.” “

Matthew Blackwell, The Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp, September 2025.

“Listen closely to The Dramaturgy of Decay, and we hear traces of lives left behind. Mark Vernon crafts elaborate sonic vestiges, as though voices adrift in the howls of the wind are caught in an imperceptible net and assembled into narrative soundforms. Hollow tones echo against burnished metallic surfaces, feeling empty and resonant. We search for messages in the static and dust, the textural shapes Vernon weaves into these pieces. The way these sounds sit in their haunted essence and soak up the microscopic movements rotting in the margins heightens this feeling of impermanence at their core. Even the voice samples are surreal remnants, simultaneously familiar and strange. The Dramaturgy of Decay may seem fleeting, but its aural language stays around long after the last whisper.”

Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis, The Capsule Garden Vol 3.11, April 24, 2024

“Mark Vernon is a sound artist’s sound artist. He thinks about sound, he thinks about sounds, how they feel, their effect on human perception and their inherent storytelling capabilities, and he thinks very deeply about how he wants to organize sounds for us.

I will get descriptive about this new record in just a moment but, for the first time, I’d like to make sure you know a little bit more about Vernon before I do. This is unusual for me because it’s not that I don’t appreciate the “how” and “why” (the press release bits) of music, in general, in fact I do tremendously. It’s just that my thinking with this blog is that you can usually find that info elsewhere so mostly I want to try to describe an artist’s album in a way that does justice to the creativity in the music.

All that said, there are artists out there who have earned so much of my respect over the years, who have paid their dues a thousand times over, who work so passionately hard, and who give back to their community of creative practitioners 10x what they themselves reap.

And one of those, unequivocally, is Mark Vernon. At least for just this once, I’d like to introduce you to just some of Vernon’s incredible work.

For one thing, he co-runs and operates Glasgow’s art radio station Radiophrenia, which culminates once a year as a listening festival. He was also a founding member of Glasgow’s Radio Tuesday collective, has set up several other art radio projects in the UK like Hair Waves, Efford FM, and Nowhere Island Radio. He’s created tons of sonic projects and albums both solo and with an extreme variety of collaborators. And since 2011, he has co-run the Lights Out Listening Group, a bi-monthly event focused on creative listening in complete darkness.

He’s also a fervent tape collector. I’m a tape collector, and as a tape enthusiast myself, yes I am totally jealous of Vernon’s archives.

I didn’t mention this biographical data because it should tell you how to listen to Vernon’s work, it doesn’t need that explanation, but rather as an invitation into a sound world that is already so densely packed with meaning, sometimes it’s okay to feel like a guest in someone else’s home when it comes to music.

And on this note, one of the central feelings I get when I listen to his work, and The Dramaturgy of Decay specifically, is like we’re looking through old photograph albums in an elderly couple’s living room over a pot of tea. We’re being told tiny fragments of stories, stories plucked from lives well lived that are not our own, moments and memories that we can claim no ownership of but are allowed to borrow for make believe, and come around to visit from time to time.

And there’s a magic alchemy when that happens in sound. We hear voices from the past, the tape recorder gives us access to that person’s story in a brief, privileged slice of time, and yet the collage of these sounds coming together, the resulting artistry of the bricklayer’s hands at work, inspires us to remember our own past, and recall our own fragmented memories.

Why is that?

What is that effect?

There’s something about how we cognitively allow individual stories to remain distant, but when they compound and compile, we begin to see ourselves in the accumulation or combination of sounds and stories. And I’d venture to hypothesize that this derives from our human need to make links between the collective and our individual experiences in life, perhaps for the survival of our clans.

Around a campfire, we share, and we make sense of the world communally to be better prepared for its obstacles and mysteries. Sharing is connecting.

Such would’ve been very much the case in England’s mid-century Tape Recording Clubs, which is another of Vernon’s research obsessions. Here’s a quote from Vernon explaining this hidden history briefly:

“At one time there were tape recording clubs dotted all around the country – dedicated amateurs would meet and swap tips, exchange recordings, enter competitions and arrange activities such as field recording trips. Eager members would lug heavy reel-to-reel recorders around the countryside, to church concerts, fire stations, airports and carnivals to capture the sounds around them. Many experimented with their recording techniques, putting together their own documentaries, plays, quizzes or pre-recorded slide-show commentaries.”

A source of sound material that Vernon has tapped into occasionally, it’s clear that these tape recording clubs would’ve featured a bright variety of personalities and a ton of social informality and amateur-borne whimsy. But at the heart of it is the act of sharing amongst members of a non-judgmental community, and connecting with one another.

But I haven’t even talked about the main theme of this record according to Vernon as it’s referenced in the title. A lot of this record concerns “decay,” the beautiful, strange, ephemeral, and silly at times phenomenon of things leaving us here on planet Earth.

Whether that means things actually decomposing over time, or our memory of those things, or our ability to comprehend things, whether decay is actually just as if to say that things fade into each other, or even perhaps to suggest decay as the first stage of regrowth and regeneration, Vernon definitely uses this as a conceptual jumping off point. It touches everything here, and is a central focal point when listening to this music.

Some pieces on The Dramaturgy of Decay sound like we’re sifting through a pile of old dusty objects we excavated from a dirt hole in the yard, and examining them one by one. Nothing’s quite clear, nothing sounds as good as it did when it was first recorded, but there’s just enough signal in the noise to get a glimpse of that original moment, and we can happily let our minds wander to fill out the rest of the picture ourselves.

And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?”

Jeremy Young, The Royal Editoryal May, 2024

A series of dark, ethereal and spectral sequences on ‘A Wrong Turn Towards Eternity’, the 10-minute opening track introduce us to the latest work by Glaswegian sound artist Mark Vernon. Vernon is accustomed to a form of audio-archaeology characterised by the use and abuse of found tapes, home recordings and fragments of voices mixed with ambient sounds, to create a disturbing, restless and fascinating soundscape of memory. It is the urgent poetry of the everyday that perpetually returns in art and music to remind us that technologies – such as those used to record sound – shape emotions and perceptions, effectively transforming our being in the world. The Dramaturgy of Decay is artfully arranged with answering machine messages, distorted voices, recordings of laughter and applause, amateurishly played instruments and homely songs, all elements that are manipulated and reassembled, slowed down or sped up, deconstructed using multiple procedures, intermittently passing from a familiar register to a hallucinatory one. ‘All men have a secret attraction for ruins’ wrote Chateaubriand, and this fascination with the aesthetics of the sublime is now tinged with retrofuture considerations, or with an absence of time – as ultimately it is never clear when this disappearance occurs: during the artist’s compositional process, or during the listening process? A deep feeling of melancholy pervades the seven tracks that make up this album, a juxtaposition of heaven and the grave, of city and desert, where a sense of transience is implicit and takes place through subtraction and erosion. The Apollonian idea of ​​classical unity contrasts with the Dionysian idea of ​​fragmentation: ‘what remains’ – his imagery – becomes the constant engine of a sort of fantastic abandonment and of a new poetics, which continually changes over time, subject to evolution and then destruction.

Neural.it

“Vernon is a skilful and sympathetic excavator of found tapes, but this time around he didn’t find much of note in the French city of Brest’s flea markets. On the final day, Michel, a contact from the festival Vernon was attending, gave him some of his own family’s reel-to-reel archive, a goldmine of memories preserved in sound. “Lean Developments In Noisy Thoughts”, “Bucolic Plague” and “Every Page A Gentle Wave” present motifs recorded from a TV’s loudspeaker which are knitted into an elliptical, eerily recurring structure.

There’s the sense of life repeating itself not with the computerised logic of the loop, but the impressionistic skim-read of memory. Like fellow UK musician Robin The Fog, Vernon revels in the patina of vintage sounds without locking the listener in place and time.”

Derek Walmsley, The Wire magazine, February, 2024

Mark Vernon likes to explore the sonic environment of a specific geographical setting like an archaeologist. After Lisbon (“Lend and ear, leave a word” released in 2016), Thailand (“Ribbons of Rust” published in 2019), here we are in Brest for the third episode of his of his Audio Archaeology Series. As usual, he mixes field recordings made on site by himself with other recordings made by anonymous people and recovered by chance from flea markets or other encounters. We then witness a confrontation of temporalities in this working method which allows engagement beyond the immediate period of the field recording, creating a network of new connections between past and present. Dissolving chronology into multiple temporal flows. One could imagine oneself in a Philip K.Dick universe! In any case, we’re a long way from the spirit of phonographic postcards, far from the spirit of culture and heritage. It’s more like a collage of found objects, in the intimate interstices of a vanished experience, in the complicit off-field of a reduced listening. The main treatment given to all these recordings lies mainly in the mix highlighting the characteristic of each support, and also in the fact that we sometimes re-record with a mic directly in front of the loudspeaker. The found or recovered recordings carry a grain and a story – at least the one that we make of them. Beyond the magnetic tape itself (for sounds recovered), its quality, its breaths, its weeping and shimmering, it is also the content of the tape itself that carries a story through anecdotes (radio credits), slices of life and even handling defects. And if Mark Vernon’s work can sometimes be likened to radio art, it’s a far cry from radio nostalgia, or the mystification of a regretted past. Here, we’re talking about erosion – in the sense of degradation, deterioration – and saturation – in the sense of excess. Like the image of a world on the brink of collapse. So hurry before the programmed disappearance!

Jérôme Noetinger, Revue & Corrigée (translated from the French – see below for the original)

“Vernon is a long-time producer of radiophonic works, and various are site-specific. ‘Sheet Erosion’ is number three in a series of Audio Archaeology, and this time, he visited the French of Brest. “It comprises 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.” These tapes are from someone named Michel and reflect his taste in music and radio programmes. Vernon didn’t use cables to capture what was on the recordings but used the speakers and recorded whatever else happened at the same time. There’s a telephone, conversations, the wind howling around the cabin (if indeed it is a cabin. I might be imagining things), people talking and ‘then’ meets ‘now’. The space in which he plays his sounds becomes an instrument of transformation, as do the objects he finds in the place. Sometimes, the speaker gets obscured and muffles the sound; sometimes, the music from the tapes is very recognizable (although, for the life of me, I can’t remember the tune’s name), and not at all. Does Vernon use some kind of processing? Digital or electronic? I thought about it every time I heard this CD, and in these somewhat quieter days before Christmas, there was indeed some more time to listen to it, and I’m unsure. There are bits in here that I think could very well contain some kind of electronic processing. Still, I also considered the possibility that everything he does comes down to unusual ways of capturing his sounds and maybe some filtering, removing specific low or high frequencies. Whatever it is that he does, it adds to the mysterious quality of the music. As always, it has a kind of radiophonic quality combined with the qualities of a great horror movie. Some of this material is very ghostly and obscure, but I appreciate it mainly because of that eerie atmosphere. It doesn’t scare the living daylights out of me, but it has a cosy, creepy sound; the sound of yesteryear, perhaps, a sense of longing for the past. Maybe it’s a conservative zeitgeist thing? Maybe it’s just old age! I love it.”

Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, December, 2023

“Mark Vernon aime à explorer l’environnement sonore d’un cadre géographique précis tel un archéologue. Après Lisbonne (“Lend and ear, leave a word” paru en 2016), la Thaïlande (“Ribbons of Rust” paru en 2019), nous voici à Brest pour ce troisième épisode de son cycle Audio Archaeology Series. Comme à son habitude, il mélange enregistrements de terrain réalisés sur place par ses soins avec d’autres enregistrements effectués par des anonymes et récupérés par le hasard des puciers ou des rencontres. On assiste alors à une confrontation de temporalité dans cette méthode de travail qui permet de s’engager au-delà de la période immédiate de l’enregistrement de terrain et de créer un réseau de nouvelles connexions entre passé et présent. Dissoudre la chronologie dans de multiples flux temporels. On pourrait s’imaginer dans un univers de Philip K.Dick ! En tout cas, on est très loin de l’esprit carte postale phonographique, loin de l’esprit culture et patrimoine. On serait plutôt dans un collage d’objets trouvés, dans les interstices intimes d’un vécu disparu, dans le hors-champs complice d’une écoute réduite. Le traitement principal apporté à tous ces enregistrements tient principalement dans le mixage soulignant la caractéristique de chaque support, et aussi dans le fait de parfois réenregistrer avec un micro directement à travers le haut-parleur. Les enregistrements trouvés ou récupérés transportent un grain et une histoire – en tout cas celle que l’on s’en fait. Au-delà de la bande magnétique elle-même (pour les sons récupérés), sa qualité, ses souffles, son pleurage et scintillement, c’est aussi son contenu qui transporte une histoire dans l’anecdote (générique radio), les tranches de vie et même les défauts de manipulation. Et si l’on peut parfois rapprocher le travail de Mark Vernon de l’art radiophonique, on est très loin de radio nostalgie, ou d’une mystification d’un passé regretté. Il est ici question d’érosion – dans le sens dégradation, détérioration – et de saturation – dans le sens de l’excès. Comme l’image d’un monde qui court à sa perte. Alors vite avant la disparition programmée!”

Jérôme Noetinger, Revue & Corrigée

“Another fine set from Mark Vernon – Sheet Erosion (SONORIS sns-25), mostly made in Brest in France around 2020 and commissioned for a radio station, I believe. He combined recent field recordings of storms with “found” materials from the 1970s and 1980s, donated by one Michel Le Bras. This gentleman’s home taping hobby led him to record segments from his favourite radio and TV shows, and also some more “ordinary” domestic scenes of his family. Music, dialogue, sound effects.

If you’re at all familiar with Mark Vernon’s work, you’ll know that everything in this list so far is meat and drink to this very original tape collagist and electro-acoustic composer, who delights in old recordings wherever he can find them, savouring not only the contents – glimpses of the past – but even the condition of them, doing what he can to rescue audio fragments from crumbling tape and flaking oxide. As always, a very sympathetic and humanistic view of the world emerges from his gentle editing interventions, all enhanced with evocative titles such as ‘A Convocation of Ghosts’ and ‘Empire of Dampness’, and every moment suggestive of a radio play. From 22 November 2023.”

Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector

“How long does it take for something to peak, become outdated, and return in a nostalgic rush, a pleasantly retro experience? Some might say this occurred with vinyl (although it was never really gone), Polaroids and bell bottoms. This week Mark Vernon turns his attention to slide shows, whose origin can be traced back centuries to “magic lantern slides”, but whose 35mm glamour peaked in the mid-twentieth century. During that time, some even paid to see slide shows, although a more derided version was the home slide show, a horror to which neighbours subjected each other upon return from their vacations. On Call Back Carousel, Vernon resurrects the audio portion of the slide show in all its glory, adding music to found tapes of slideshow commentary to create a disorienting, time travelling montage.

Readers of a certain age will instantly recognize the sound of the slide projector, which narrowly escaped being made fun of in a Suicide Squad movie; its younger sibling, the overhead projector, took the bullet instead. Classroom and boardroom staples for decades, both were made obsolete by Powerpoint in 1987. But everyone will recognize the voices of older people over-explaining things to anyone who will listen.

The album begins with the a click, waves, birds, a distant opera. The travelogue launches at the Paignton Zoo in 1968, “a very nice beach” according to the narrator. “I don’t know what this bird is,” he continues, explaining his technique. A jaunty song plays in the background, with a happy whistle. “Flamingos – they make a kind of honking noise,” he mansplains. Vernon adds amusing aural cues over the wobbling reel-to-reel; but the track gets really interesting when the narration begins to loop and fall apart, imitating the abrasion of time. Might this man still be outside the exhibit, caught in a time loop, attempting to get Polly to speak?

The Austrian Tyrol is the next stop, with an introduction that sounds like it comes from the tourist board. Slides flutter by in a rush. One thinks of the dullest documentary one has ever endured, spiced up by sound, Vernon acting like a precocious yet brilliant child, adding cuckoo clocks, rail sirens, rushing wind, flowing streams, cowbells and orchestral snippets. A stuttering grown-up calls one spot “the bla-bla-bla and the bla-bla-bla,” making clear what we feared as children; the adults were often bored too. Thank God for that kid in the room that distracted us during such presentations by drawing pictures or making sounds, even if they were sent to the office later.

By “Scotland 1971,” we’re immersed in the spirit of the project. These little aural plays are likely much better than the original products. For long stretches, narration disappears; each sentence sparks a new sonic arrangement. A pause at a bridge leads to traffic; a description of pastures is the beginning of a biophany. To be fair, the original intentions of these slide shows may have been similar: that words and images might spark the imagination. Bagpipes are sampled and applied like aural paint. The machine falters at the end, firing rapidly before dying in a groan.

“Torquay 1969” is the “summer track,” covering a trip to the beach, water skiing, fishing, ice cream, and other summer sounds. The Hawai’an music prompts a question for the listener: which aspect of the recording is the most evocative? Is it the description of summer reverie, the field recordings of summer fun, the song? Travelling back in time, what might an original viewer have felt: jealousy or empathic joy?
While slide shows are no longer a thing, they have mutated into something else: let me show you pictures of my vacation on my phone. Our attention spans have grown even shorter, making these shows much shorter than the presenters might desire. The narrative arc disappears, replaced by the sharing of only the best shots. But in this, something has been lost.

While seldom enthralling and often dull, the classic slide show produced a short story in the form of a travelogue, an art in its own right, whose spirit Vernon captures through a neighbouring discipline. Twelve minutes of vicarious travel (the average length of each track) is not too much to ask of one’s friends, and Call Back Carousel helps us to recall the charm of an antiquated mode of presentation. By restoring dignity to the slide show, Vernon makes the practice worthy of re-evaluation.”

Richard Allen, A Closer Listen, June 2023

“Glaswegian sound artist and radio producer Mark Vernon collages an “audio time-travelogue” on ‘Call Back Carousel’, using found tapes from hobbyists and amateur recordists that were originally intended to accompany slideshows.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s, hobbyist photographers would put together slideshows of 35mm photographs, documenting trips to the beach or to the zoo. Sometimes, these events were accompanied by pre-recorded commentaries, spliced with music and environmental recordings to create a cinematic narrative. And for the last two decades, Vernon has been collecting reel-to-reel tapes from the era, cleaving the commentaries from their visuals and working them into rich soundscapes that tell of a quaint, eccentric Britain that’s almost faded completely from view.

The first piece is made up of 1968 recordings from Devon’s Paignton Zoo, opened with a slide machine click and some scene-setting environmental sounds. Music hall memories underpin an old man’s voice, who describes the day out: “I don’t know what this bird is,” he moans. As the piece develops, Vernon’s collage techniques get more distinct, with microphone noise and musical snippets creating the mood while voices connect us with the lived history. The rest of the album plays similarly: a visit to the Austrian Tyrol, a trip to Scotland, a day out in Torquay and a beach vacation at Brighton are realized in stereo, with all the humour and quiet familiarity you’d hope for.”

Boomkat, June 2023

“The first noise you hear on Call Back Carousel sounds almost like a cassette being popped into a tape player, but on closer inspection, could also be the sound of slides clicking through a projector carousel. You hear that click a lot on Call Back Carousel, a remarkable album by Mark Vernon that beautifully builds from a unique source of found footage: reel-to-reel audio commentaries from lost collections of vacation slides dating to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. What we’re left with on each track is a recording of a description of a picture of an experience had by a stranger. The images are long gone, and the people probably are too. There’s only the impression of an experience, heard in descriptions of weather, pointing out people we’ll never find in backgrounds we’ll never see. Vernon treats the audio with the kind of care and respect reserved for ancient fossils as he restores them through wonderfully descriptive soundscapes and vivid foley design. And gradually, through sound, a picture begins to develop.

These fused audio treatments create a ghostly sensation that brings to mind The Caretaker or even Nurse With Wound—it’s a haunting experience, but Vernon crucially makes it a moving one, too. Call Back Carousel is so seamless, it can be easy to forget the immense labor in applying these sounds or the time spent with these lost voices, trying to hear and see what they saw. At one point in the recording “Torquay, 1969,” a man describes stumbling onto a cave before admitting with audible regret that it was too dark to really photograph, even with the flash. He didn’t even have the right type of film for that with him. Who can plan for that? But Vernon chooses to fill the moment with the sound of dripping water, echoing footsteps, and an atmospheric coldness that must have been deeply inviting in the heat of that summer. It’s like you can see it just as the speaker did 50 years ago. And it doesn’t matter anymore that he forgot the right kind of film, because for a moment, you’re right there with him, and the cave is full of light.”

Bandcamp Daily, Acid Test, Miles Bowe, August 10, 2023

“Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue based on found tapes of pre-recorded commentaries from the 60s and 70s. These commentaries were originally recorded to accompany slideshows for amateur recordists and photographers, which Vernon has used to create his own audio collages and soundscapes.

The five collages that comprise this album are titled and dated according to (presumably) where and when they were originally recorded, and begin with the sound of a slide projector clicking to life.

Our journey starts at Paignton Zoo in England, 1968, where we’re aurally guided through aviaries and monkey cages, and introduced to toucans, parrots and other exotic creatures with varied snippets of fractured old-timey music to accompany us along the way.

Then we’re off to The Austrian Tyrol in 1972, where we’re informed about the three mountain ranges, and the recommended methods of transport and suggested practicalities of getting around this provence. This is against a pretty eerie backdrop of ominous thuds, traffic noises, birdsong and brooding ambience.

After that we find ourselves in Northern Scotland in 1971, combing the long empty beaches and visiting famous castles. With all this we can hear fragments of traditional Scottish bagpipe music, public transport noises, dark drones, tranquil waters and an array of shuffling sounds, among other things.

Then we move onto the seaside port town of Torquay, England in 1969 where the narrator is commenting on what he sees from a parked caravan – the harbour, promenades, gardens, boats etc… while Vernon provides more warped old-timey music and we hear flocks of seagulls and a gathering of people having a good time, being interviewed about their jetskiing/diving experiences and their observations of the sea. Then the narrator goes off mackerel fishing…
The piece ends with some abstract sound experimentation and weird atmospherics, along with more amusing adventure anecdotes and nostalgic music.

We end our journey in Brighton, England in 1971. This composition starts in an ol’ pub (we hear the familiar sounds of people drinking and talking) before quickly moving onto the seafront. The narrator comments on the picture galleries he sees by the pebbly seafront, while in the background we hear people playing on the beaches and waves gently crashing. These recordings are broken up by bursts of old carousel music and various stuttering sounds. Then the narrator takes us to the shops, and talks about some photographs he took along the way. Towards the end of the compositon, the soundscape becomes all woozy and the recordings become more distant, until the whole things fades and disentagrates into nothingness, and we’re left with the lonesome sound of the slide projector idling away before finally being turned off.

‘Call Back Carousel’ is a nostalgic, whimsical, demented and quite melancholic sound journey through historical sites, famous landmarks, tourists spots and must-see places around the globe during a bygone era… accompanied by fragmented musical samples, audio manipulation noises and conceptual sound art experimentation. It’s strange and intriguing, creepy and alluring, bittersweet and playful, haunting and amusing… a mixed bag of emotions, and also creatively adventurous, which makes for a delightful and fulfilling listening experience.”

Audio Crackle, Fletina, August, 2023

“Mark Vernon’s ghostly, immensely moving Call Back Carousel invites us to try and grasp something impossible. Starting with found audio tapes offering narration of someone’s vacation slideshow, Vernon uses foley effects and sound treatments to bring these forgotten experiences to life. The occasional rhythmic click of the carousel flings us somewhere new and unpredictable in time and space, but in these voices we always find the familiar—warmth, humor and a faint sadness at the passage of time. It’s somewhere in that space, between the imagined sounds of those lost photos of an experience no one will ever quite know, that Vernon captures a flickering piece of humanity.”

Bandcamp, Acid Test’s Best Albums of 2023, Miles Bowe, December 11, 2023

“Writing on acousmatic music, composer and musicologist John Palmer speaks on the inherent surrealism of recorded sound, stating “an acoustic sound becomes mysterious, the real becomes surreal, the Known Unknown.” It’s a thought that’s elaborated on by Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen of the University of Oslo in the essay “The Naturalised and the Surreal: changes in the perception of popular music sound” for the influential Organised Sound journal, noting “One possible consequence of this tendency is that this virtual space can become utterly surreal, displaying sonic features that could never occur in actual physical environments.” All recorded sound has a hint of the uncanny about it and more than a hint of the surreal.

Call Back Carousel is a set of imaginary travelogs that take you on a journey through time as well as space. Each of the five entries is built around a found reel-to-reel tape recording that’s meant to accompany a slideshow. These recordings are then layered with incidental music and found sounds to become dreamlike, phantasmagoric journeys through imaginary landscapes.

“Paignton Zoo, 1968” takes you on a journey past toucans and cockatoos, purring panthers and shrieking gulls. In the distance, muffled waves are heard while crystal radios and spectral choruses pulse in the distance. An Andy Griffith whistle enters, giving the outing a jaunty bounce, until it’s swallowed in a sea of static and bird calls, as our narrator goes full Doctor Zhivago. “The Tyrol, 1972” has more of an official feel, with its audiobook cigarette burns and canned classical music, serving as a sonic tour guide through this alpine landscape. You’ll hear cuckoo clocks and crystal-clear brooks, which just makes it that much more disorienting when the reel starts eating itself like an uroboros.

“Scotland, 1971” makes a journey to the highlands sound like a voyage into the heart of darkness, with its grave intonations and lonesome footsteps, made that much more eerie with its foghorns and fiddles and drowning depths. “Torquay, 1969” is one of the more scattered offerings, with a narrator extolling the virtues of a campsite’s toilet facilities over some slack key luau music until it’s swallowed by the surf, while the mechanics run haywire and slipshod all the while. “Brighton, 1971” is both the most familiar and the most unsettled. It’s an audio documentary of the British child’s dread holiday to the seaside, all barrel organs and gentle waves, which goes soft and strange around the edges, subsumed in a quicksand of whirring motors and analog hums.

Listening to Call Back Carousel, it’s impossible to tell what’s from the reel-to-reel source material and what’s been doctored in post. That’s the fun of it. It’s not trying to be an out-and-out documentary, being more similar to the layered collages of Max Ernst than the naturalist gaze of Jacques Cousteau. These surreal soundscapes end up saying more about the source material than if they were presented as straight field recordings. Yes, these soundworlds don’t exist. Neither do the Brighton of the early ’70s or a late ’60s zoo. The world where elderly relatives might sit us down to show us a slideshow of their vacation is mostly extinct, even. Listening back to these sonic collages invites us to take a trip through the idea of these locales, but it also encourages us to pause and think about endangered technology and the ways of life that go with it. Call Back Carousel invites us to question what we’ve lost while we ponder its soft-focus surrealism and Kodachrome glory.”

J. Simpson, Spectrum Culture, 15th October, 2023

“Call Back Carousel (DISCREPANT CREP102) exhibits and reaffirms a number of familiar tropes and concerns of this unique creator – the interest in obsolete analogue equipment, the rescue of abandoned tapes from the past, and likewise the rescue of voices from amateur tape-makers and home-movie makers from long ago.

Specifically, Vernon is zeroing in on the slide carousel, a set-up which I am now compelled to explain (as is he, in order to convey what he’s doing with this record) – it involved loading your holiday slides into the magazine of a projector which could rotate automatically and show them in a chosen sequence, and (if the home amateur was really clever) could synch up with a pre-recorded cassette tape, most likely a voice-over explaining each photo to the weary viewer in the dark. Many a visiting aunt and uncle have fallen asleep on the dralon sofa watching such a display, one must assume. It’s a selection of these tapes which Vernon has somehow managed to accrue as part of his vast collection of found recordings, and are now redeployed here – pretty much played straight through, although there are the subtle additions of music (played on wobbly cassettes), repeats, loops, and other tape treatments which he does with such care. Flickering images from the past thus come to life, through the creaky speaking voice of a retired gentleman making his banal observations on bird life in Paignton zoo or chatting with holidaymakers on the beach in Torquay.

It’s not just the obsolescence that interests Mark – I don’t know if 35mm Kodak slides are even made any more – but also these fascinating glimpses of ordinary British life which seem to come from a world that is all but vanished now. As ever, Vernon treats this material with sympathy, truly giving a “voice to the people” without a trace of condescension or irony. In fact, the more ordinary (for him) the better; he effortlessly sublimates it into art. I’ve probably mentioned them before in the context of a Mark Vernon review, but compare this with the work of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players from Seattle, who tend towards a more ironic form of presentation, and it might be illustrative. Vinyl release with an extra track available for digital streamers.”

Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector, 9th February, 2025

“The work of Mark Vernon is a kind of aural alchemy, conjuring nuggets of gold from everyday ephemera. Last year’s ‘Sonograph Sound Effects Series Volume 2: Public and Domestic Plumbing and Sanitation’ created strange new landscapes from ubiquitous gurgles and glugs, and ‘A World Behind This World’ is a similar piece of sonic magic.

‘Fugitives from Bliss’ transforms chainsaw chug into time-slowed growl like the guttural call of some lurking monster, While ‘New Golden Severities (Vermin Under the Stars)’ swoops us omnipotently through a a landscape of bleating sheep and running water, before sinking down to a subterranean sewer drone. As the near-20-minute piece progresses, a climatic whoosh and turbine-like hum merge into birdsong and rumbles, which harmonise in unexpectedly emotive patterns.

Rather than simply documenting a landscape or an object, Vernon’s work sweeps recorded sounds – from the rural environment to industrial machinery – into something fantastic and new, creating vivid soundscapes from disparate sonic detritus.”

Spenser Thomson, Electronic Sound

“This brings together sound and art into a cohesive tapestry formed from literal sculptures at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden. Recorded, manipulated, and processed by Glaswegian, Mark Vernon, the end result is something both enthralling and beguiling. Sounds clatter, throb, respire, and twitter.
Sometimes the source is obvious like a bird or a drill, other times recordings of furnaces, grinders, extractor fans, and copper guillotines pepper the sonic landscape, creating mood and intrigue with every emitted noise. The clash of industry with nature invites us to think about these parallels within our own lives and the ways that they combine both jarringly and harmoniously.”

State51Conspiracy

“A World Behind This World is one of those electroacoustic records that, in equal measure straddles the line between the artificial and the natural.  In this case, when I say natural, I mean unprocessed, or untransformed via the latest and greatest software.  I’m including the “unnatural” sounds of power drills and various metal objects and machines (and there is a bunch of those) that are not sliced, diced, cut up, fragmented, or otherwise fucked with in a processing environment in this natural category.

I think this is significant because I, as the listener was led down a path where I hardly noticed such things.  There was no clear-cut line between what is, and what can never be. 
One of the main reasons this album stands out is because of this simpatico between worlds.  Ferrari does this so well, and I think Vernon does too.  I was able to frolic and prance (I know, bad visual) within this tableau never thinking that those weird echoey pigeon-like coo’s that were playing hide and seek all over the soundstage (on the lengthy “New Golden Severities (Vermin Under the Stars)”) were any different than the sheep conversing amongst themselves (surely about the spot price of wool on the local commodity exchange) later in the same piece.  They were both just “there”, and they both just “belonged”. The processed (the coo’s) and unprocessed (the sheep-talk) sound events were presented in such a vividly spatialized manner that I imagined myself not only watching a 3d movie but living within it too. On top of that, it was all woven together in such a natural way that the veil between the “what was real” and the other place, where the mind is not presented with enough raw information (or maybe too much) and the imagination takes over was…non-existent.

Some thoughts about the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial.  The natural is tangible, it’s something you can feel, see and hear.  Does that logically lead to a conclusion that the artificial is only an imagined construct existing in your mind?  Does the artificial have a weaker standing than that of nature?  The senses and the mind say otherwise, and I think this is an extremely appealing aspect that acousmatic music can demonstrate well.  Blurring distinctions between the two by disembodying sounds from their source brings the whole natural/artificial package on to a level playing field.  A perception is a perception…whether it comes from nature or is fabricated in a lab…the honey badger (or the mind in this case) doesn’t care.
 
I feel that I strayed too far down a philosophical path, but Vernon’s sound choices are interesting.  On this release, he did an excellent job of simultaneously dropping the listener into a pastoral setting while at the same time jacking them into an artificial dream state.  A fusion of two ideas to become a third.  What happens next is an individual choice.  Does realization make it go away, or can you revel in it?

There is also a refreshing lack of concept on this album.  All we really know is that Vernon’s interests lie in something called “audio archaeology”.  This implies similar tools and sound sources as label mate Iain Chambers, although unlike Chambers, there are really no hints of an overarching theme (the sounds of old tech), featured location, or structure being audibly depicted.  I admire this kind of tabula rasa because of the freedom it provides the listener.
I don’t know about you, but I enjoy and prefer when artists show, and don’t tell.  I’d much rather be the master of my own imagination than be handheld by thematic clues and song titles.  Give me a Jon Anderson phrase like… “Battleships confide in me and tell me where you are, shining flying purple wolfhound, show me where you are” any day.  A World Behind This World does just that.  Ambiguous song titles, disembodied sounds, and that all-important sensory breakdown between the real and the fantastic, the tangible and the fanciful, the visible and the illusory…these are my reasons for digging this album.  Hope some of you can check it out too!”

Michael Eisenberg, Avant Music News, October, 2022

“Right after high school I spent a summer working in an automotive factory. I was working in one of the loudest sections of the factory allegedly, where massive machines pressed sheets of metal into the shapes of doors and hoods. My first few days were spent away from the machines though, in the close but muted breakroom while I read a lengthy book full of security protocols. I was fascinated by the sounds of the machines though – a large, but limited, variety of thuds, crashes and hisses, an organized cacophony performed by unknown processes. I even tried recording those sounds one time, just by leaving my phone near one of the machines. I never did anything with those recordings though. The problem was that within a few weeks of working with those machines and hearing and, even worse, understanding those processes, I had lost interest in their sounds entirely. It had turned from a gorgeous, inexplicable, industrial orchestra to a repetitive, mechanical, corporate beating that required uncomfortable earplugs to endure without developing a headache or hearing loss.

To be clear, the problem with these sounds wasn’t just that they had become linked to my employment and my daily labour, it’s that they no longer surprised me – they were demystified by my understanding of their processes, and that spoiled my fetishization of those sounds. The harsh metallic clang that sounded like the smack of a gong, the stomp of a giant and a car crash all at once had become the generic sounds of ‘Press 2’ in operation. Now that I had an explanation in my head, my mind was no longer free to perceive these sounds however it liked, my fascinated curiosity was gone. But luckily for me, what Mark Vernon’s latest album offers is a whole factory (well, a workshop, but I’ll get back to that) full of unexplained sounds – sonic evidence of various machines, tools and processes that I’ll never understand – and again, I’ve been captivated by the mysterious incidental industrial orchestra.

Much of this mystifying effect comes from intrinsic qualities of the recording process. When an event is recorded, the sound is extracted but the context is left behind. To return to my auto factory example, I think it’s fair to say that if I quit that job the day I made those recordings I wouldn’t have become bored of them. They would have been able to exist in my mind as decontextualized sound matter, as abstract, meaningless, metallic thuds, but they lost that ability once my mind began to focus on the cause-and-effect operations that were responsible for their soundings. Meanwhile the workshop that’s been captured on A World Behind This World has been recorded as audio rather than as impressions in my memory, and any understanding of these sounds has been left behind at the factory. As there’s no way of knowing what is being produced by these processes or how, the listener is forced to address these sounds as-is and to permit them to act as their own context.

What this results in is a massive shift in perspective between what was recorded and what is heard. What Mark Vernon recorded was various operations being executed, all with a specific meaning and goal: the production of something. The sounds that came from these machines and devices were like the heat that comes from incandescent light bulbs – accidental, likely even unwanted, but essential to the process. But Mark hasn’t shared with us the items that these processes were made to produce, there’s no included photos of the final products for example. All he’s shared is the sounds – items made from the production process which are not what the machine was made to create. That’s where the twist in perspective takes place – Mark Vernon may have made recordings of a factory that produces physical items, but he left with recordings of a factory which merely produces sound.

At this point I’d like to note that the ‘factory’ that’s been recorded here was quite different from the auto factory that I once worked at – A World Behind This World was recorded at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden. By recording both in and around the workshop and mixing these indoor and outdoor perspectives together, the pieces takes on an imaginary, impossible perspective which leads to moments as surreal as grinders and saws seemingly being ran by birds and sheep. It also interests me that he chose a sculpture workshop, rather than an auto factory for example, because it means that what’s being produced isn’t just a commercial product but a work of art, the same thing this album is, and the recorded processes are creative ones, not unlike Mark Vernon’s own creative processes used to make this music. One could even take it as far as to say that these are recordings of performances by an artist, and in the album’s credits, workshop technician Eden Jolly has in fact been credited as a ‘performer’. From the opening moments as Eden tightens a bolt or rotates a hinge or kicks a stuttering engine into action to the closing moments of roaring machinery being deactivated by trained hands, practical moments of the technician’s performance have been deeply baked into this soundworld, but the specifics and the extent of it is another question with an answer that’s been left behind in the workshop.

The other part of the mystification process that makes this album so enjoyable to me comes from performance and processing. There’s no implication that what’s heard on this album is what was heard in the workshop, and there’s no saying how far from the truth each sound is or isn’t. Elements are sped or slowed, sequences are dissembled and constructed into imaginary processes, and the steady rhythm of tape loops allows for the creation of new sonic machines. Clearly structured melodies and patterns bring a momentary sense of artifice, but there’s a remarkable trait to the assembly of these compositions that makes it all flow and feel so right – it’s as if they’re following the natural logic of another world, of a world behind this world, perhaps.

I’m sure it could be read in a bunch of ways, but to me the title of this album refers to a world within the artist, the world they create in their mind which exists in the space behind the world in which we all take part in. And I think it follows that that’s the world where this natural logic exists, that this album is how the Scottish Sculpture Workshop sounds in the imaginary world behind this one, the one that exists in Mark Vernon’s mind and is released through his music. That idea is a big part of why I love music like this – it’s a glimpse at my own world through someone else’s ears, mutated by someone else’s creative perception, understood by somebody who isn’t me and an unanswerable mystery to me. This isn’t something specific to artists or field recordists though – I think everyone with a brain has access to a world behind this world, specifically catered to their own unique mind, imagination, memories, fantasies and perception. The most significant thing that Mark’s done here, really, is share his.

As I’m writing this I can hear the sounds of power tools from the floor above my head. It could be a recently emptied apartment being renovated or a tenant constructing a table or maintenance of heating or plumbing processes. It interests me how the electric tools have their own specific frequency that they operate at, which makes different sounds as it resonates against different materials, as its applied with different pressures for different durations. I also like the uncertain gaps in time between these sounds, the sporadic bumping and chatter while they presumably do work that’s less loud. I’ve started recording these sounds again too. I could probably go up there right now and ask what they’re doing and find an answer, maybe they’d even show me around what’s being worked on, but I’d rather not know. I’d rather let them to continue to exist in my mind as unknowable sounds captured in a world behind this one.”

Connor Kurtz, Harmonic Series

“A Glasgow based sound explorer, who already has a significant body of work behind him (with 16 releases documented on Discogs before this). A WORLD BEHIND THIS WORLD is basically a collection of audio movies in the manner of some Luc Ferrari (i.e. his “Presque Rien” series of works), companioning interesting mixtures of electroacoustics, noise and field recordings.

The results are not arranged in any musical form, but in a way that could be interpreted as telling a story, as one encounters different environment, sounds, and sonic events on the way. The most significant of these is the opening near 20 minute voyage titled New Golden Severities (Vermin Under the Stars), of which I’ve no idea how the title relates to what is heard. Fugitives From Bliss has a kind of claustrophobic feel to it, as if within some buried metallic structure witnessing various sounds that enter from passages and windows around it. A little more “musical” in its approach, Build The Hole To Suit The Stone involves what sounds like electronic cicadas swirling around, filtered on many different levels, and again as if in some metal structure. Finally A Pale Object In Search Of A Shape is another audio movie, sounding something like a trek from a tropical forest to a farm, on which we’re eventually caught up in the works of a combined harvester!

Although immaculately put together, I’m not sure how repeat listenable this release will be, nor what sort of audience will really like it. It’s quite a curiosity though.”

Audion, Issue No. 71, Oct 2022

“A World Behind This World is an adaptation of a radio piece produced for the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in 2021. The soundscape presented over the four tracks features different audio captured during the aforementioned workshop in Lumsden in Aberdeenshire, an area teeming with not only natural sounds but also the noise of machinery and mechanical processes like tractor engines, electric saws, drills, welding torches, anvils, hydraulic jacks and so on. The impression one gets when listening to A World Behind This World is of heavily edited recordings with a musical and balanced flow. The album begins with ‘New Golden Severities (Vermin Under the Stars)’, a recording of almost 20 minutes that begins with percussion, followed by drones and the sounds of machinery, animals and water from a stream. It is difficult to think that all this happens ‘live’. The emphasis is on the succession of events, the quality of the combinations and the expressive use of non-traditional instrumentation. On the second track, ‘Fugitives from Bliss’, this impression is strengthened. First we hear the roar of at least one motorcycle, followed by the grunt of a pig and then various recordings of liquids flowing, birds chirping all manipulated with audio effects including echoes and delays. The remaining two tracks feature a similarly eclectic mix of audio sources – an artistic choice that does not follow the ‘purist’ direction of unedited field recordings, yet is still a valid and engaging body of work.”

Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural, 22nd May, 2023

“More enjoyable to my macabre ears is Tape Letters From The Waiting Room (PSYCHÉ TROPES TROPES007). Even before you play it, you can tell from that title alone, and the eerie cover image, that we’re pretty much getting a semi-occult transmission here, messages from the beyond, delivered by séance and psychic forces. Vernon’s music here was composed as the soundtrack to a film created by Steven McInnery, a cinematic work which received several citations at experimental film festivals in 2020 and 2021, and was apparently made entirely by splicing together segments of found 16mm footage. McInnery intended to author an “existential drama” and explicitly wanted to explore themes of “death and rebirth” with his edits. I never saw the movie, but it’s evident that Vernon’s sounds here are in total sympathy with the project, taking the listener directly into a strange, spooked-out paranormal world from the instant the stylus hits the grooves. Disembodied voices, ambiguous fragmented stories from abandoned tapes (see Time Deferred, above), backwards tapes and chilling atmospheric moments, all amounting to a suitably unsettling sojourn in this strange world that lies beyond the Veil of Tears. Even Vernon’s track titles are evocative and poetic, for instance ‘A Photograph of a Photograph’ alluding to the mysteries that can be induced by the mechanics of refilming (and indeed reprocessing magnetic tapes, a process that he knows so well); or ‘Beforetime Guests’, a very lyrical way of alluding to the dead visitors arriving at the séance in the form of floating ghastly heads or ectoplasmic manifestations.

In my mind I can’t help connecting this LP to certain records by the Italian artiste Simon Balestrazzi, who has likewise revealed a penchant for the supernatural and the occult in his work, using the tape machine and processed drones as his private portal to visit the “other side”; one excellent example (and a favourite of mine) is the Candor Chasma collaboration, a very evocative set in which it appeared to be possible to travel time to visit certain famous mystics and visionaries of the past. However, Mark Vernon might not exhibit the exact same relish for the supernatural; although this LP is thrillingly weird, what comes over in the final analysis is a sense of longing, regret, nostalgia for the past, and sympathy for our dead relatives and forebears, some of whom appear wreathed in misery and trapped in an endless loop of reliving their past sins. Vernon has consistently exhibited this compassion and warmth, this connection to humanity, throughout all of his unique work, and this is further evidence of it. Vinyl release; issued with a section of 16mm film in the sleeve. Scry your own copy with a magnifying glass to reveal your own personal ghosts lurking in the frames.”

Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector, June 2023