Flaming Pines / FLP153 / CD/DL (2025)
Limited edition CD and download on Flaming Pines.
This continuation of the ‘Magneto Mori’ series is a process-based sound work that investigates the collective memory of Brussels residents, intertwining them with environmental sounds of the city to weave new and unexpected narratives. It is an exploration of tape recording as a form of memory storage – and the deliberate distressing, eroding and deterioration of present day sounds to disrupt their chronology; historicising the present and fast-forwarding the effects of time.
In counterpoint, a semi-autobiographical text by Elodie A. Roy reflecting on her parent’s memories of Brussels is interspersed throughout the piece appearing as a series of answerphone messages.
“One way to interpret Vernon’s evocation of Brussels is as a patchwork of interdependent absences. We hear numerous spoken stories, yet none of them in full; details are lost to magnetic erasure, to the truncations of compositional editing, to the recollective limits of fallible minds. A voice hesitates as it recounts an early memory of falling. Another falters into damaged tape as it describes a trip into the forest, words sunken irretrievably under disruptive plosives. Into these gaps, Vernon pours atmospheres that perfectly render sensations of potential and inarticulability: the gurgling of water, the overlapping chatter of public spaces, amorphous suspensions of drone, all of which act like guardians to these tender zones of absent specifics.
One speaker describes their return to a familiar space as like “rewriting on the same page, and sort of erasing what I had lived there, in order to make space for new memories”. It’s therefore perfect that Vernon’s process should centre the manipulation of analogue tape: a medium synonymous with the imperfect overlay of the past upon itself, with the previous contents of overwritten cassettes forever threatening to burst through. After recording residents of Brussels describing their earliest childhood memories, Vernon intentionally distressed the tape and buried it underground for 10 days, placing it alongside magnets that damaged and part-erased the contents. These recordings were then excavated and recombined in a random sequence, with Vernon occasionally “reconstructing” damaged memories by inserting extracts from the higher-fidelity originals. Despite the hands-on nature of this process, the end result feels like a more authentic depiction of the interaction between time and human memory than if Vernon had simply allowed the untampered tape to run. The present is never an immaculate and unbroken “now”, but a nonlinear jostle of immediate sensory experience, overlain recollections and lost histories pressing in at the edges, the words scrawled over themselves until the page starts to give way”.
(Liner notes by Jack Chuter)
Produced during a residency at Q-O2, Brussels in August, 2022. First broadcast version commissioned by Elisabeth Zimmermann for Kunstradio Ö1.
Narration written, performed and recorded by Elodie A. Roy.
Featuring the voices of Henry Andersen, Diana Duta, Julia Eckhardt, Nika Breithaupt, Stuart McGregor, Amber Meulenijzer, Pauline Mikó, Caroline Profanter and Mark Vernon.
Thank you to the participants, everyone at Q-O2, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Elodie A. Roy, Barry Burns and Manja Ristić.
Reviews:
“…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
