Presenting for your approval the final set of recordings ever(?) made in BBC Television Centre’s East Tower, demolition of which is scheduled for this month and by the time you read these words may well have already started. This ‘Final Gathering’, produced as part of arts organisation White Noise‘s programme of artist residencies in the tower’s closing weeks, was produced by taking two recordings of groups of visitors arranged in the stairwell making various humming sounds and then playing several copies of these recordings together with subtle changes in pitch, attempting to create Ligeti-esque sound-clusters on a more modest scale – in fact the working title was £20.01: A Splice Odyssey. Hope you’ll approve. There’s a rather nice blog post on the White Noise website about this piece and it’s precursor ‘East Tower Dreaming’, which you can read here.
Furthermore, eagled-eared Howlround fans and/or lovers of Radio 4 might have also heard me talking about the project on flagship news programme The World Tonight last week, in which I attempt to give a brief introduction to the mysterious world of resonant frequencies. The report has subsequently been included on the Radio 4 website and promoted with the following tweet:
— BBC Radio 4 (@BBCRadio4) July 29, 2016
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…Which, sure as night follows day, was accompanied by the usual amusing replies by random snipers, such as ‘Just presenters counting their money’ and ‘Saville walked these corridors’. Such concerned citizens might have their fears allayed by my informing them the project came in well under the aforementioned £20.01 budget and that I was never in any danger of being haunted by the ghost of disgraced former presenters, having never actually visited the tower in person – all the sounds were collected on my behalf by my butler and head gardener, while I stayed at home on the chase-lounge, being fed grapes while lighting expensive cigars with a collection of high-denomination bank-notes. There is, as I’ve had cause to mention before, a HUGE amount of money in experimental sound art…
Just kidding! Moving on, Resonance FM have also uploaded Howlround’s performance at their Live To Air gala evening to their Mixcloud page. Consisting of entirely new and currently unreleased material recorded especially for the event, it’s a little warts-and-all as live recordings tend to be, but worth a listen, though I’m still intending to do something more polished with the material at some future juncture.
Finally, do please join us at Full of Noises Archive Night 1 at V22 Summer Club Louise House, Forest Hill, London on Friday 12th August, where Howlround are performing alongside Helen Petts, Sybella Perry and Ingrid Plum, at an event put on by our old friends The Octopus Collective. Details can be found on the Full Of Noises website here. and tickets are available here.
Robin The Fog 