Hello you. It’s been a quiet couple of weeks on these pages, but relatively rowdy elsewhere. For starters, you may have heard the announcement that international snooker legend (and Howlround fan!) Mr. Steve Davis has now been announced as the superstar DJ special guest at this year’s Delaware Road festival, 17th/18th August in a top secret military complex somewhere near Stone Henge. I’m sure I’m not alone in being both a) very excited about this development and b) completely unable to say ‘Stone Henge’ without channelling my inner Nigel Tufnell. As if the lineup could get any more fantastic!
To celebrate this momentous news, Nick Taylor’s The Dream Machine have created the latest in what I hope will be a series of Delaware Road mixtapes. It’s the perfect soundtrack to accompany hasty ticket purchase or for staring at this rather super photo that I borrowed from elsewhere on the internet:
In other Howlround news, the machines and I recently unveiled a brand new and original sound design for the Under Ground London exhibition now on display at the London Metropolitan Archives in Farringdon. Designed for use at low-level and in accompaniment of archive footage of tube stations, sewers and civil defence installations, the soundtrack consists of Howlround tape loops combined with contemporary field recordings by London tour guide Andrea Vail. Obviously for optimum effectiveness it’s best to go down and view the work in situ, but those of you lacking speedy access to Farringdon can check out a brief extract below:
As explained on a nearby wall inside the exhibition space, our intention was to produce ‘…an abstract sound portrait of some of London’s hidden spaces[…] The intention here was to try and create an experience evocative of the sounds every Londoner will recognise: distant trains in tunnels, the squealing of wheels, the rush hour claustrophobia and the occasional sudden moments of unexpected calm and solitude. The creation of a modern soundtrack also acts as a slight juxtaposition to the more historical nature of the films on display, bringing the past into the present’.
Entry is free and this fascinating exhibition runs until 31st October 2019, which should be plenty of time for even the most geographically inconvenienced of you to pop down and check it out. Although I must add a note of caution, not all of it is for the squeamish:
The soundscape was produced as a spin off of sorts from the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project and is hopefully just one of many pieces of outreach and engagement work. The team are now over six months into this three year project to preserve and catalogue five thousand ‘at-risk’ analogue sound recordings and already we’ve unearthed all manner of fascinating artefacts, some of which end up online at our Londons Sound Heritage blog. My personal favourites so far have to include the embarrassment of riches on offer from the Inner London Education Authority, in particular this unassuming-looking tape ‘It’s A Gift’, which you can read more about in this blog post I wrote a few weeks ago entitled ‘The Strangest Song Ever Written?’
Finally, I’m pleased to announce an exclusive Howlround track closes the latest compilation from the ever-redoubtable A Year In the Country stable. The Watchers is the latest in the label’s long-running series of themed compilations and also features contributions from The Heartwood Institute, Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer and many more. This time the theme was the ancient oaks of Britain and for my contribution I travelled down to Tilford, that picturesque village on the banks of the River Wey in Surrey. It’s the site of a good deal of happy memories (a significant portion of my childhood was spent in a nearby village), a rather nice pub (a significant portion of my childhood was spent never going there), and more pertinently an oak that is rumoured to be at least 800 years old. I’m willing to bet that in all those centuries it has witnessed very few things as ridiculous as the sight of your humble scribe scrabbling about in the dirt with a pair of contact mics, trying to persuade it to cooperate. But I hope you’ll agree that persistence has ultimately paid off. Pre-order your copy here.
Amongst Britain’s trees there are thought to be over 3,000 ancient oaks – those which date back 400 years or more – and of those trees more than 115 are 800 to 1,000 years old or more. They are part of a tree population that also includes ash trees that have lived for hundreds of years and a yew that is estimated to be between 2000-3000 years old or possibly many thousands of years older and that some consider to be the oldest living thing in Europe.These are living organisms which could be seen to be undertaking a very stately, still form of time travel, to be watchers and observers over the passing of the years, centuries and even millennia.
Given the nature of the album’s theme and the kaleidoscope of high-class experimental sounds to be found within the sleeve, I can’t help feeling that AYITC have missed a trick by not entitling this compilation ‘Bark Psychosis‘. You see what I did there? No, no, I’ll see myself out…
Robin The Fog 