The Dark Tales And Strange Sounds Team return to Copped Hall on Saturday 29th March for another evening of storytelling, performance and spooky sonics amongst the picturesque environs of this partially restored stately ruin.
Julia Stallard will be telling the grim story of the Witch Trial of Agnes Waterhouse, and we’ll delve into the horrors of 18th Century healthcare and hear the grim story of eye-surgeon Chevalier John Taylor. Spooky tales will be provided by Minnie Wilkinson and by Sinister Masterplan (Laura Sampson and Sam Enthoven), who will recount H D Everett’s The Whispering Wall – the tale of a haunted mansion in which there’s a wall with a mysterious voice, reputed to tell you where you’re going to die…
We’ll also discover the grim details of Agnes Waterhouse’s 16th Century Witch Trial and find out why men of the Essex Marshes boasted of having up to ‘five-and-twenty wives’! Sound artist Karina Townsend will be on hand to capture the sounds of the Hall’s resident bat population – they always make an appearance at these events! Plus of course the usual live tape loops from me and the machines, including mandatory audience participation. Plus a well-stocked bar and a roaring fire. Wrap up warm – it’s the coldest building imaginable!
I love these events so much, always a highlight of the calendar and in the most fantastic surroundings! Last few tickets available here. Do make sure you read the small print – it’s an old building in the middle of nowhere, so you’ll need to be able to get there and get home under your own steam. Otherwise you might just be doomed to roam those spooky corridors forever…
Join sound artist and composer Robin The Fog for an afternoon exploring the magic and the chaos of composing with magnetic tape. Learn to create your own far-out analogue sound worlds with little more than a microphone, a razor blade, some sticky tape, and a sense of adventure – and with not a single pedal, plugin or synthesiser in sight!
Last remaining tickets are £5 and can be found here (suitable for ages 12 and up). There’s also a free performance in the evening from 7pm, using some of the loops created during the workshop! Just turn up at The Birley, PR1 2QE.
This short course will equip you with a fundamental awareness of working with magnetic tape, both as a tool for recording and playback but also as a remarkable gateway to new ways of sculpting sounds, performing and improvisation, through the basic techniques of musique concrète. From its origins in post-war Paris via the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the theme from Dr. Who, to the experiments of Brian Eno and its role as the backbone of dub, reggae and decades of electronic and ambient music, you will learn from the masters and gain an understanding of basic recording and editing, create tape loops, experiment with delay and also get a chance to test your newly found performance and editing skills in a final improvised performance.
Sandbox is an open and informal gathering where leading sound practitioners share their latest work and meet fellow sound artists. Delivered by Modus Arts, a National Portfolio Organisation with Arts Council England, presenting sound arts projects across the UK encompassing installations, live performances, acousmatic musics, sound sculpture, sound archives, oral histories, and workshops.
Can’t wait for this – hope to see some of you there!
Hello You. A very hasty round-up written in the dying moments of 2024. Truth be told a LOT has ben going on and I should probably be having a stab at something a bit more substantial, but I’m having to type this squeezed onto a desk that barely has room to contain my laptop, one of Mum’s potplants, a boombox playing Indonesian Noise Music and the oversize keyboard I’ve had to use ever since the letter ‘N’ on my macbook stopped working. Tidy up? I think you know me better than that!
First things first, I am absolutely chuffed to bits to have the latest Howlround LP included in Electronic Sound Magazine’s Albums of the Year list yet again! And this just happens to coincide with the fact that you can currently pick up a copy of A Loop Where Time Becomes on attractive purple vinyl for HALF PRICE while stocks last due to the current Castles In Space end of year FLASH SALE! Turns out they have so much coming out in 2025 that they urgently need the warehouse space, so click here to snag yourself a bargain!
Thanks once again to the team at Electonic Sound for their support – always a stimulating read and this month featuring Jean Michel Jarre, the man I always think of as my very VERY first exposure to the wonderful world of strange and beautiful sounds. Comes with a tasty 7” too!
Speaking of a Year In Review, the good folk at Touch Music recently asked me to resurrect their long-running Touch Radio series with a round-up of my favourite Touch-releated tracks from 2024. The resulting hour long mix is the first stirings on these pages since 2021, and takes its place alongside an archive of 150+ episodes hosted by the great and the good of the experimental community and stretching back well over a decade – so get stuck in!
As mentioned earlier, I really should spend a bit more time writing a review of a year that has seen more than its fair share of audio adventures, from a spectacular Berlin light-show to a cave far beneath Margate, to an appearance on East Midlands Tonight (I think that’s what it’s called?!), a smoky room in a ruined mansion, a festival tent in Wiltshire, friendly welcomes in Barrow in Furness, Hastings, Coventry plus a triumphant Howling Homecoming at Cafe Oto. Even ended up in Normandy having an absolute stone-cold legend of acousmatic music buy me dinner! And that’s just off the top of my head. A better blog post would have provided photographic evidence, but this desk is driving me mad and I think wine might be opening downstairs, plus I’ve got to take the dog out. Cute dog pictures I CAN do!
Thank you so much to the many friends, co-conspirators and fellow nerds who have come along for the ride once again this year. Wishing you all a Happy New Year and here’s to more Sonic Adventuring in 2025!
100% of proceeds will go to Medical Aid for Palestine and Lebanon, supporting health and dignity for Palestinians living under occupation and as refugees.
We’re beyond excited to announce that our cherished Noisemas Party is back! We know it’s short notice, but after much consideration, we felt the urgency to come together and make a meaningful difference.
Join us on Sunday, 15th December, at LOKI in Brixton, for a 12-hour music marathon from 12pm to 12am (or maybe even longer!)
77 incredible Live performers, VJs & DJs
Noisemas is celebration of community, music, and solidarity. Not be missed!
Hello You. Been a while since I wrote anything on these pages, but certainly not for lack of incident round these parts. I’ve been beavering away behind the scenes, mostly on mixing and editing audio in more formal environments for the delight and edification of various media empires, while simultaneously trying not to use my powers to fuel the forces of darkness (which in our current political and economic landscape is harder than you might think). But it’s not all dreary (dis)honest toil round these parts as Ken Hollings and I have been hard at work on new material for The Howling and are preparing a rather special HAPPENING which will take place this Hallowe’en, of which more in due course. For now you can come and hear at least some of it this Friday 27th at Cafe Oto as our fabulous label The Tapeworm is celebrating 15 magnificent years with what they’re calling a Dalston Knees Up – or just TDK. See you there?
In other news, I’m very happy to announce that my Resonance FM show ‘FogCast’ is now back on the airwaves for a new season, every Wednesday evening at 11pm UK time, plus repeated 2.30am on Sundays. Also that Resonance has just finished building its brand new studio near Blackfriars in South London, which means for the first time in four years we can start broadcasting live again – a real achievement. To celebrate please enjoy this very special first episode which is actually a repeat of one especially commissioned for after-hours playback at the recent We Out Here festival.
Pity I couldn’t have accepted their ticket offer and gone along to hear it in situ, but as I mentioned before the current media landscape is very demanding. What is the world coming to if a chap can’t even slope off to a festival anymore?!
Anyway, three cheers for Resonance getting their studio back! As always this most excellent broadcaster and registered charity is currently in need of financial support, so do please consider visiting their fundraising page and bunging them some much needed cash. And hopefully see some of you on Friday?
Hello You. Very excited to announce a two day Howlround residency taking place 11th-12 May at project DIVFUSE in Hackney, both days consisting of a daytime workshop/installation/loop creation session (free to anyone who would like to come along and contribute!) and then a performance in the evening of the day’s recordings, for which limited tickets are available. All are welcome and warmly encouraged to drop in at some point over the weekend and contribute their voices (or indeed any other intriguing sonic material in their possession) to the proceedings. Then in the evening we’ll survey the beautiful wreckage and transform the surviving loops into some kind of performance. Having hosted recent installations at the behest of such luminaries as Hackoustic, the Royal College of Music and the state51 conspiracy, I can assure you that it will provide strange noisy fun for the entire family in the daytime and make for an eerie, otherworldy soundscape once the sun goes down. Further details and tickets can be found here.
From the press release: The installation will consist of an ‘eternal choir’ created by a series of vocal recordings made on a single tape loop stretched across the project space and running continuously throughout the day (or at least until it finally disintegrates and a new one takes over). Visitors and participants will be invited to listen in then contribute their own voices, the only instruction being that they harmonise with whatever was on the loop before them. Removing the tape machine’s erase head from the equation means that theoretically it should be possible to build up multiple layers of interlocking voices that blend, morph and disintegrate together before your very ears. Although given that this is vintage technology, nothing is ever certain. What we can guarantee is that we’ll create sounds that nobody else has ever made before and we’ll create them together. Both days will culminate in an evening performance featuring all the tape loops that have survived.
Hello You. There’s intrigue and mystery aplenty at Fog Towers this week, starting with the latest episode of Resonance FM’s FogCast, which opens with ‘Reflections’, the first of two remarkable electroacoustic works by the composer Phil Ellis. These come from two of three tape spools handed to me by the artist Brian Webb, a former colleague and collaborator of Phil’s who dates these to some time around the early 1980s. I’ve digitised the tapes, conducted a little basic restoration and now I’m playing them here as an appeal – in the hope that somebody can help us track Phil down as this may be the first time the work has been heard in 40 years!
You’ll also hear several tracks from Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal, the new solo album by former Stars of the Lid member Adam Wiltzie, plus recent works from Will Gardner and Field Lines Cartographer. The programme closes with a second Phil Ellis piece,’Unquiet’, followed by four extracts from Maryanne Royle’s installation ‘Look at this Land, Look Around You’ at Gallery FRANK, an original Victorian Mill in Littleborough. ‘This work is about where I am and where I’m coming from,’ Maryanne explains, ‘growing up surrounded by the immense abandoned bodies of a deafening and consuming industry turned silent’. Composed using found sound, field recordings and local voices, it’s a sublime listen indeed.
Elsewhere, the mystery and intrigue also spills over into the kind of tawdry cheap melodrama you’ve come to expect on these pages with the thrilling arrival of the new single by The Howling – now accompanied by a decidedly snazzy promo video for your viewing pleasure!
Just when you thought it was safe to back into the Spook House for the Late-Night Monster Show, The Howling return with their latest single. This digital release offers radical new takes on two tracks taken from their recent Wormhole album Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway.
Track A is a video version of ‘The Skydivers’, The Howling’s deadpan exposition on a spectacularly lacklustre movie melodrama, backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine. Combining the original studio version of the track with visuals specially prepared with the expert assistance of Executive Producer Lori E. Allen, ‘The Skydivers’ offers all the highs and lows of this moody soap opera in which people either fall in love or throw themselves out of planes.
Track B is a pounding live version of another track taken from The Howling’s ‘Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway’ release. ‘The Picture of A Picture of Dorian Gray’ pays tribute to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel. Using keywords scraped from the IMDB entry for the movie, The Howling reconstructs Wilde’s narrative as a fragmented sequence of plot points, themes and images. This recording was made in the teeth of severe technical problems at the Horse Hospital in London on 3 November 2023 and turned out to be greatly enhanced by them. This live version also includes a spoken-word introduction not featured on the album.
The Howling have presented work at Iklectik and the British Film Institute; and their track ‘David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ was prominently featured in the Loewe SS24 catwalk show during Paris Fashion Week. They’re still not sure why.
Thank you to everyone who came down to Wow and Flutter in Hastings last week for a live in-store session by The New Obsolescents, especially our completely lovely and awesome hosts Tim and Susan for having us and putting up with our ‘spooky racket’ – all part of an extended run of events to celebrate their ten years in business. Happy Birthday guys! Tim shot this short video taster above and we’re hoping at least some of the material we recorded in the shop will end up surfacing on a second LP at some point. But before then I’m very excited to announce we’re playing Deliaphonic in Coventry on May 2nd!
Finally, thank you so much to Electronic Sound magazine for the fabulous review of the new Howlround LP A Loop Where Time Becomes in their latest issue! Always such a supportive bunch and a total force for good in the universe, I never miss a copy. This month’s main feature is all about the year 1981, a period of which my own memories are understandably hazy, so it’s proving a very handy guide. It also features legendary figures such as Dorothy Moskowitz, Man Parrish and ever-lovable curmudgeon Savage Pencil, so lots of bases covered. Just make sure you don’t drop a copy on your toe…
A Loop Where Time Becomes is out now on limited and delightful purple vinyl and available from the Castles In Space site and all good record shops. Plus some bad ones…
Hello You. Very excited to announce the return of The New Obsolescents, the tape loop and turntable trio I share with my two dear chums Chris Weaver and Strictly Kev aka DJ Food. Last seen providing a ‘spooky racket’ at the Levitation Festival in Whitby a couple of years ago (my memory for dates is growing increasingly hazy), for our next trick we’re hitting the coast and heading on down to Hastings on Sunday 7th April for The first in a series of events celebrating ten years of the Hastings record shop Wow And Flutter. This is a live, improvised performance/rehearsal/jam session conducted in-store during which we’re hoping to lay some of the groundwork for our long overdue second album, so if you’re in the area, do come down to cheer us along (and naturally indulge in some digging in the crates). Plus we’ll be displaying some unique test versions of the sleeves for our sold-out-in-five-minutes 2021 debut LP for Castles In Space, The Superceded Sounds Of The New Obsolescents. If you remember the album came in a choice of five sleeve designs hand-printed on the very last available consignment of mirrorboard card stock, so this might be the last time they ever appear in public…
The following week Howlround will return to the ever-dependable Boundary Condition in its new home at East London’s plantroom. It’s the usual fantastically diverse line-up and features star turns from old friends and new, including Blanca Regina & Pierre Bouvier, Dirar Kalash, B E O R H T A, Yamen Mekdad, Billy Pleasant & A’Bear, Gyorgy Ono and Cerpintxt & Ruben.
Or as the press release rather more elegantly puts it, a hybrid of audiovisual live sets & immersive projections; extreme plunderphonics, sonic archaeology, contemporary folk, unequal temperaments, ritual subjects, visceral subterranean chants, freejazz improv, radiophonic interdisciplinary composition, tape disintegration, anti-ambient, and percussive non-music in a post-industrialist glass factory. Are you sold yet? I know I am! Tickets available here.
Finally, just wanted to share this short clip from last month of my Howlround performance at Manifest:IO Berlin with multimedia artist Kunal Singh providing visuals on the most enormous 22m video wall behind me. It was a pleasure collaborating with him and thanks so much to Harshini and the team for inviting me to play. Just a short clip on Kunal’s Instagram for now, but hopefully more will follow in due course. Make sure you give him a follow – and photographer Yu Ling Cheng as well!
OUT NOW: Castles in Space is delighted to have been able to curate an album pulled from Howlround’s unreleased tape archive – and this fabulous promo video created by the great Lori E. Allen to support it:
After twelve years, ten albums and innumerable live shows (including at least one former underground reservoir), the Howlround sound has indeed changed quite a lot, but the basic ethos remains the same as it did back in 2012. All tracks are created by manipulating field recordings dubbed onto analogue tape, with all digital effects and artificial reverb strictly forbidden – a process that has been described by Electronic Sound Magazine as ‘conjur[ing] magic’. Of the twelve tracks here, only one has been physically released on a limited edition and long out of print compilation. A second appeared on a download only release several years ago and a third was created as part of the unreleased soundtrack to a documentary. Everything else on this compilation is seeing the light of day for the first time.
All were created in South London at various periods between 2012 and 2017, five years during which the project evolved from the Radiophonic mournfulness of 2012’s debut album The Ghosts Of Bush (‘The ultimate Hauntological artefact’ – Simon Reynolds), to 2015’s tour with tape legend William Basinski, to 2016’s darker and weirder soundtrack to Steven McInerney’s multiple award-winning film A Creak In Time and on towards what would become the wilder, gnarlier noise of 2019’s The Debatable Lands. This retrospective from the first five years marks the gradual evolution of Howlround from the earliest days conjuring ‘aural ectoplasm’ from nocturnal field recordings of the last days of an underground BBC studio to increasingly spurning of the external world altogether by creating blistering no-input noise and raw analogue feedback.
It’s been quite a trip. And we’re not done yet. Thank you so much to Neil Mason over at Moonbuilding Magazine for making A Loop Where Time Becomes their Album of the Week! Have a read by clicking below:
If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Howlround, brace yourselves. Robin The Fog, the man behind all this, is a ferric wizard. What he does with tape is little short of astonishing… The amazing thing when you listen to all this is that there are no instruments involved whatsoever. No nothing. It all comes out of the air, be it a field recording he’s buggered about with, or his collection of reel-to-reel recorders capturing the sound of each other. There’s two versions, the vinyl, which delivers 12 tracks and the digital that’ll give you six bonus tracks including the epic 10-minute plus ‘Cradle Spools Version Tk3’ which feels like being hypnotised by bad weather as distance fog horns tell you all about it. Said it before and I’ll say it again, what Robin The Fog does with tape is pure magic.
By weird coincidence, given that this is an archival release and features outtakes left off from Howlround’s debut album The Ghosts Of Bush (albeit reworked a few years later), the week before saw the publishing of an interview with the estimableNavel Gazers blog, originally recorded towards the end of last year, in which I reflected on the gestation of that very album at the behest of host Andrew Ciccone.
Over the course of a couple of hours we talked about Radiophonics, the BBC World Service, the joys of nightshifts, things going wrong in interesting ways (aka my entire career), and – with perhaps a little irony – never listening to or revisiting any work once you’ve finished making it. As mentioned here and repeated in my interview with Moonbuilding above, I’m not generally one for looking back or becoming nostalgic, so perhaps all of this might feel just a touch hypocritical. But in my defence it remains true that I’ve still never gone back and listened to The Ghosts Of Bush, not since that day in 2012 when I approved the test pressings.
Thanks very much to Andrew for having me and be sure to subscribe to Navel Gazers for more interviews with fellow geeky audio types. Previous guests include Matmos, Mark Vernon, Beatriz Ferreyra and Kate Carr, so we’re in very good company!
Hello you. It’s Valentines Season once again and time for us all to show our love to some good causes. Here are three that are very close to my heart, and no doubt yours as well. Please consider supporting one or all of them and let’s all do our bit to support grassroots art and culture in these gloomy times.
First off, as regular visitors to this site will be only too aware, our Friends at IKLECTIK lost their venue recently, due to the Old Paradise Yard site being the subject of a greedy land grab by nasty old developers. A small oasis of creativity and wonderment in the heart of London disappeared forever. Or has it?
For their part the Castles In Space label have scrambled and are launching a brand new fundraising compilation This Is Not The End. In record time they’ve managed to pull together a fabulous 33 track compilation of new and exclusive music from CiS artists – including the exclusive Howlround track ‘Splattering Penge Version Two’. As label head Colin puts it: ‘I swear, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever been involved in. The quality of the work from everyone involved speaks volumes about the respect in which Isa and Eduard are held from anyone who has ever had an interaction with them or played at their amazing venue’. Order your copy here.
However, time is tight. The crowdfunder closes at the end of this month and it’s an all or nothing deal. If they don’t make the target, all money will be returned and we will have lost something very special. Their future plans include finding a new home and taking the IKLECTIK experience to other venues around the UK. CiS have opened up all tracks on the album so people can listen on the bandcamp, but this album will not be available on streaming platforms. Please give what you can to ensure these excellent people can continue to do their exceptional work – and don’t wait, time is rapidly ticking!
Elsehwhere, the excellent Brachliegen Tapes have unveiled their latest release REQUEST STOP, a 16 track compilation loosely based around the theme of bus travel and its related infrastructure – and featuring another exclusive Howlround track ‘196 is a Joke’, one of our heaviest works for quite some time. All proceeds will be donated to the Autonomous Winter Shelter, a housing network and mutual aid initiative who aim to provide a safe and warm space for people to stay, create, and take care of themselves and others within a community environment. AWS were violently evicted from their home in June 2023 and it is our hope that the money raised through this fundraiser compilation can contribute to the collective’s future activities and solidarity fund in the face of the on-going brutality of austerity and the cost of living crisis in the UK. Direct contributions can be made to the solidarity fund to help AWS sort out basic items like toiletries, sleeping bags, mattresses and other items needed urgently by clicking here.
REQUEST STOPfeatures a mixture of Brachliegen alumni and a number of new arrivals. Contributions to the comp range from audio documentary and sound collage to pounding rhythmic industrial noise and anarcho bus punk live from the depot. Blistering tapework, electro-acoustic experimental folk, warped techno, minimalist compositions, field recordings, deconstructed grimescapes, heavy electronics and demented psychojazz all conspire in solidarity against the dereliction of social care.
Finally, the greatest radio station in the world is holding its annual month-long fundraiser to raise crucial funds and continue its remarkable programme non-profit, ad-free independent broadcasting, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. Every day of the year their two extraordinary stations – Resonance FM and Resonance EXTRA – each broadcast 24 hours of original programming, entirely free of commercial influence. Their pioneering, award-winning and ever-evolving schedule of extraordinary broadcasts covers all kinds of topics. Not just music – from ambient to zydeco, grime to improv, folk to feedback – but literature, fine art, theatre, film, video-games, field recordings, climate change, social justice, finance, international development, civil rights, technology, radio-art, and so much more.
Resonance is not just a radio station. It’s by turns a lifeline, a toolkit, a toy, and a utopia. It’s supports and empowers a community of emerging broadcasters, artists, musicians, writers and thinkers from the fringes – and that includes me, because this months marks exactly TWENTY YEARS since I started volunteering as a callow youth back in 2004!
It’s a passionately engaged community of listeners as well. Here’s the kind of thing just a few of them had to say about the station:
“The vibes, the energy, the songs, the insight, the metal chimes, the hosting. It’s so perfect and powerful.” – “We need you more than ever.” – “Many thanks for the music during these trying times.” – “A voice of sanity in the gale of the world!” – “Thank you for sending antidepressants down the radio waves every weekend.” – “It’s wonderful to see this kind of excitement!” – “You just don’t get this in the dross of most other radio.” – “I love Resonance because it gives artists space to be creative and be themselves in a crazy time like this!” – “A truly unique outlet.”
New premises in Southwark – but it’s not cheap!
But unfortunately these things don’t come cheap. Despite the station winning the GOLD award for ‘Publisher or Network of the Year’ at the 2023 Audio Production Awards for the second year running, financing such radical and uncommercial broadcasting does not come cheap and if they cannot raise further funds before Easter 2024 Resonance’s future will become deeply uncertain. Happily there’s lots we can all do to help, including making a donation, becoming a regular donor or supporting the various fundraising events taking place over the next few weeks.
You could also donate your voice – and this is perhaps the quickest and easiest way to make a big difference. Resonance has been commissioned by technology company Logitech to record the voices of up to 900 unique individual speakers by 31 March 2024. The company is commissioning anonymised recordings of speech with no background noise for the purposes of machine learning – to help it to tell the difference between “pure” recordings of different kinds of human speech with no background noise, and human speech with background noise. It’s machine learning, essentially.
Supplying Logitech with this anonymous audio – in addition to their normal activity – offers Resonance the opportunity to significantly increase its income and – to the extent that they can recruit volunteers – the chance to move forward rapidly with their plans for 2024. That is why they’re asking all volunteers, programme makers and listeners to book a slot as soon as possible to visit the new HQ and record a 15 minute speech session in our soundproof room with the help of an engineer (example video here). With a maximum target of 900 sessions before 31 March, Resonance really needs your help – and that of your families, friends, colleagues, listeners and networks to ensure that we’re making the most of this opportunity. So do please consider booking a slot and encouraging others to book one too. Resonance needs you!
