42 MINUTES IN THE DOCK MUSEUM

We had the usual warm welcome and a great audience at the Barrow Dock Museum on April 20 for the Sound Collage show. 
Comments  and suggestions so far include: 

 ..it was something entirely unique and totally mesmerising..

 (we enjoyed) particularly the simplicity of it, which spoke for itself; each sound or track being really ‘clean.’

 (we) thought that using different speakers for different sounds would have been interesting and I’d have quite liked to have sound from other directions as well. I think the material was simple and clear enough to take a little bit of shifting and shuffling about.

 ..really enjoyable and varied show and we both loved it.

Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes jolly and sometimes mysterious..

Nice to meet another Joe Meek fan in the audience too.

From our point of view the show seemed to go very quickly, but it was only 4 minutes short of what we think of as the optimum length. When you are working with largely finite clips of sound, and (apart from the locked groove at the start) no looping  it should be possible to keep things pretty tight so I'm glad we managed that. We had a good sound too...the Dock Museum has a good acoustic, and Damo provided a nicely balanced mix.

I did an interview on Radio Cumbria to promote the show, and Paul Braithwait the presenter asked about how we go about putting the piece together..do we have a big sheet of paper with blocks of sound arranged on it? Yes we do...here it is..     

And here's an MP3 from the desk recording of the show...

https://soundcloud.com/user-628037322/hall-tyson-rose-barrow-dock-museum

Thanks again to Victoria (who also took the photos), Sarah, Simon, Graham, Anita and Nicole from the Dock Museum for their support on the day/night and to our audience, it was great to be able to present this piece  in this unique venue.

 Find out more about 

 Barrow In Furness Dock Museum here:

  http://www.dockmuseum.org.uk/

REHEARSALS AND PUBLICITY FOR DOCK MUSEUM SHOW

Met up with Ste Tyson and Damo Rose yesterday to rehearse next week's show at Barrow Dock Museum. It's shaping up nicely, we made a few additions including a lot of spoken word / advertising vinyl, voices from the Cross Keys in Barrow and some musical surprises.

You can read a bit more on the Cumbria Live pages..
http://www.cumbrialive.co.uk/Sound-effects-feature-in-free-Dock-Museum-evening-event-ff5c227e-e98e-4815-92b3-1a39886a1ae1-ds

and there's another feature on the Dock Museum's site..

http://www.dockmuseum.org.uk/Whats-on?MonthID=9&EV_Type=0

A lot of people have had nice things 
to say about this.
It all helps, and hopefully we'll see you at the Museum for a chat.

HUMAN ORGANS FOUND IN ULVERSTON CARPARK

The latest additions to the squad of Human Organists assembled last night to try out Alex's new models (see earlier post)...here are Jo and Neil Wade, me, Amy Boud and Kirsten Taylor getting all Exploratory on the Gill. Photograph by a chap who described himself as Curious of Tunbridge Wells.

https://vimeo.com/212285022

Plan is to get another sesh together involving Jamie and Phil and thus build an Organ Gang capable of playing parpy outdoor Camberwick Green trance music in whatever combination. 

Here's some additional audio made after Alex ran some repairs on Jo's squelchbass unit...

https://soundcloud.com/user-582681044/5piece-organ-rehearsal-april-2017

The sound is at least partly dictated by the time it takes to reload the li-lo bellows with air. You can make short staccato passages too, as these don't need a full res of air. The players take a lead from one of their number, who sets up a pattern, and tentatively find a space within it.  The idea seems to be: repetition is its own reward. While small variations can  be introduced within a "piece", the pace needs to be maintained. The Clockwork Trance analogy isn't as daft as it sounds, many people are intuitively tuned into the charms of repetition  and if it's a walkabout then no-one who isn't need stand around listening long enough to get bored. 

There is talk of adding voices, bells and a harmonium, but one thing to be addressed is making sure we can hear each other..three is pretty easy, five probably requires a circle.
Some visual unity is needed too. Thanks to everyone for turning out, really good fun and plenty to think about.

And GWS Rob Cooney

RESEARCH: THE DOC ROWE ARCHIVE AND THE WHITBY PENNY HEDGE

I spent a cracking afternoon in Whitby with Doc Rowe surrounded by his archive of vernacular music, performance, ritual and social ephemera. Doc's stories of great traditional singers, of recording and filming in the field and his insights into the relationship between the arcane and the present are punctuated by delves into envelopes and boxfiles. Out come copies of Peace News, advice booklets for Conscientious Objectors, proclamations and petitions regarding Franco's war on the Spanish republic, handwritten communiques from the Aldermaston marches, 

photographs from Padstow and Abbots Bromley...Burry Men, men with horns.

Doc didn't set out to collect and seems to take neither a curatorial or an editorial role. He described a common assumption in the early 60's that the music, the dances and the ceremonies had gone with the culture that produced and sustained them. It had been caught and recorded for posterity, but it was gone. Doc knew this wasn't so; the Archive, he said, came from a need to confirm for himself the continuing existence of this culture and he has amassed the evidence in miles of tape and film, great swathes of photographs and vinyl and mountains of reading matter.

There is no sense here of vitality pinned under glass, no hammering of awkward edges into a convenient shape. The Archive demonstrates that we still live in the world of the Padstow Oss and the Burry Man; a fluid and mutable world that can inspire and nourish independent thought in a confluence of magic, radicalism, anarchic wit and energy.

Doc currently has three Fine Artists working with him, each is exploring and interpreting the Archive; more streams joining the confluence.

Here's a link, and there's more on Doc's Facebook page. http://www.docrowe.org.uk/

I enjoyed my afternoon with Doc Rowe, and I'll be visiting again with this project in mind and to help Doc sort through some of the more distant corners of the Archive. 
  Walking back into town he talked about the need to respect and maintain the integrity of certain traditions and customs, and his concern that intimacy and scale might be lost in the drive to attract visitors. In his book "Mayday. The Coming Of Spring" he writes "These events have emotional and demonstrative significance that is seriously upheld; they are, mostly, not staged as tourist attractions and have in some cases survived despite external pressures"

As I write this from the Singing Kettle Caff in the harbour I know that under the waters of the Esk, just a few yards from Doc's Archive, is the Penny Hedge. I went for a look at low tide. This fragile-seeming waist-high structure of woven stakes is built annually on the eve of Ascension day, and must withstand three tides as recompense for the wrongs of three prominent local families in the 12^th Century. No tickets are sold, no-one sponsors the event. There is no accompanying faff or ballyhoo other than a cry and a blast from a ramhorn, and then in this unassuming muddy patch of the estuary the Penny Hedge is left to stand unaided against the actions of the tides.

" Often the hedge from the previous year has to be taken down in order to build the new one, so effective is its' construction. Indeed, the hedge has never fallen and continues to be built to resist the strongest tide." ( Doc Rowe "MayDay. The Coming Of Spring" English Heritage / EFDSS) 

"INTO THE ARC" BILL BARTLETT'S BINAURALS AT OLYMPIA LEISURE

A tantalising Binaural postcard from Bill Bartlett's day at Olympia Leisure in Scarborough.

https://vimeo.com/211121604

or "WALL-E Goes To The Seaside."