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C o m p i l a t i o n s

No Such Thing as a Quiet Hammer

DIN The noisy neighbours and the noise musicians UPROAR The producers, the protesters and the polluters CLAMOUR The instigators and the investigators TUMULT             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. --- Performed and produced by Barry Burns & Mark Vernon. Website: www.meagreresource.com   Myspace:www.myspace.com/vernonandburns   e-mail:meagreresource@hotmail.com           ‘Play’CD:http://www.kormplastics.nl/Audiotoop.html --- 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. #

Play 28:06 min, Mark Vernon 18/3/2009

Non-Members Night Out

A number of years ago I suffered from a bout of prolonged back pain. Bad reactions to the high doses of pain killers meant social drinking was out of the question and combined with the inability to stand for longer than 10 minutes without excruciating pain this began to seriously curtail my social life. On the odd occasion I did go to the pub I would invariably leave after an hour or so. The pubs, karaoke bars and clubs became symbols of my exclusion. It was around this time that I began making recordings of the outdoor night life on my weekly shadowy walks. I was drawn to the back doors of clubs, deserted alleys behind bars, non-places where the filtered bass of the discotheque made the sense of isolation more palpable.//This soundscape, created with sounds familiar to anyone used to prowling the streets of a big city late at night, features surreptitious recordings made outside Glasgow nightclubs, skulking around back doors and fire exits in the early hours of the morning.  Despite the obvious presence of others these sounds are strangely isolating. They document only the exterior, the periphery. The listener is excluded from the exciting and lively atmospheres that can be heard at a distance through the barriers of closed doors, brick walls and back alleys. You can hear the party going on but you haven’t been invited.//These recordings also document the effects that high volumes of music and the city’s club culture have on the surrounding architecture and acoustic environment. A door frame rattles in time, but at a slight delay, to the music within. A closely miked recording of a broken but intact windowpane at the rear of one club makes the grinding together of the shards of glass audible as they vibrate in time to the bass. Microphones inserted into drainpipes amplify the audible white noise content creating warm drones; filtered higher frequencies from the music and sounds from outside are still just audible. Windows rattle in their frames under an assault of bass heavy music.//All of the acoustic effects in this piece are natural; this is a simple edit and arrangement of the untreated field recordings. --- Produced by Mark Vernon / Website: www.meagreresource.com / e-mail: meagreresource@hotmail.com --- Abridged versions of this piece have been presented at ‘Carte Blanche’, Vollevox, Brussels and ‘The Audible Picture Show’, on ‘Framework’ (Resonance 104.4FM) and Radio Deutschland. It also appears on the Vernon & Burns LP, ‘The Tune the Old Cow Died of’ (Gagarin Records). #

Play 21:50 min, Mark Vernon 7/3/2009

Trance Mission by Dean Magraw

Acoustic improvisational track over minor blues chord progression. Contributed by Sarah Ho, AA student. #

Play 4:26 min, Sarah Ho 28/2/2009

Thinking About A New World

A conversation with Paffard Keatinge-Clay (AA dipl. 1949), recorded prior to his AA lecture in November 2008 on the occasion of the 'Le Corbusier at the AA' Symposium & Exhibition. Keatinge-Clay takes us through his spirited AA student days and early practice, with entertaining and inspiring accounts of how it was that he came to work for and to know Erno Goldfinger, Sigfried Gideon, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Inclusive of a story of the pilgrimmage, with 2 AA student friends, to Le Corbusier's studio and house where they did not meet Le Corbusier himself but instead his gracious wife who invited them to have cooked eggs and explore the house to their hearts' delight. Broadcast with thanksto Paffard Keatinge-Clay and to Edward Bottoms (AA Archives). This recording is the first in a series of oral history interviews planned by the AA Archives documenting the AA in the 1940's and 1950's. #

Play 70:49 min, AAIR 21/2/2009

Bedford Square

Bedford Square Garden is in the Bloomsbury district of the Borough of Camden in London, England. It is a private park requiring a key to enter and exit. Contact microphones were attached to the fence surrounding the park. The resulting field recording is not altered other than some equalization. The primary sound is the gate shutting as key holders enter and exit. The fence faintly transmits other ambient sounds of pedestrians and traffic surrounding the park. Most people don’t have keys and simply sit surrounding the park, leaving it empty most of the time. 'Bedford Square' is a 30 minute field recording made for radio broadcast on the Architectural Association Independent Radio (AAIR). Recorded in July, 2008. Steve Bates currently lives in Montréal, Canada where he is an MFA candidate in Studio Arts at Concordia University. He works on music, radio, and installation projects with an specific interest in experimental forms of organizing sound as improvisation and as composition. Founder and 8-year director of the sound art festival, Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound, in Winnipeg, Canada, Bates' recent collaborations include 100 Lines with jake moore, and soundFIELD, an outdoor installation at the International Garden Festival, Reford Gardens/Jardins de Métis, with landscape architect Douglas Moffat. #

Play 30:00 min, Steve Bates 5/2/2009