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Unprecedented thanks to the many people who sent such positive feedback after hearing the debut of Whirled Service on Late Junction last Thursday.  I’m afraid I was sound asleep with a severe case of ‘Nightshift Punch-Drunk’ syndrome, so it’s gratifying to know it went off without too many hitches.  In case you missed it too there are still five days at the time of writing to catch up by clicking here. After that, who knows what will happen to the project? We’ve had a number of enquiries as to whether it’s going to receive a vinyl release and the answer at the moment is a strong and hearty ‘not sure’. It all rather depends on a few factors.  In the meantime I thought I’d upload one of the original demos that didn’t make the final cut for various reasons FAR too tedious to go into here. Perhaps it will shed some light on the creative process. Then again, perhaps not:

In other exciting news, I’m very happy to be featured on the current edition of Boomkat’s excellent ‘14 Tracks’ series of download compilations. The selection, entitled ‘Eldritch Electronics‘ also features Young Echo, Carter Tutti, Eyeless in Gaza and Grumbling Fur, so I’m in good company! Click on the link above to find out more.

I’m writing these words having just arrived back in Belgrade where I shall be joining my friends at Camenzind in celebrating the launch of their fantastic architecture magazine’s second issue and also the launch of the second Howlround LP Secret Songs Of Savamala amid the ruins of the very building that inspired it. The launch party takes place on Wednesday 4th September at The Spanish House, Savamala, Belgrade.  All are warmly welcomed, assuming you either live here or can get a cheap flight. This will also mark he first time that I’ve ever taken sounds from a space and then put them back into it – a personal triumph!

Last week some of you may have received a long-overdue ‘mailshot‘ which featured news of the release of this second Howlround LP on strictly limited edition of 300 black vinyl with no represses. I included a link for those wanting to pre-order a copy at the early-bird price of a mere £10 and much to my surprise, the aforementioned faithful proceeded to literally bite my arm off. The upshot is that I’m now in the position to advise those of you still wishing to purchase a copy not to dilly-dally on the way. Click here to avoid disappointment. It’s softened the blow of the fact that due to a slip-up at the pressing plant I’ve arrived for the launch party without the finished product. Just a slightly battered test pressing. Ah, well.

I’m not even going to proof-read, just click ‘publish’. Then I think maybe an early night…

Well, I did promise you a moderate revelation of sorts….

I’m very excited to announce the premier of a brand new work on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction this Thursday 29th August. Comissioned by the programme itself and entitled Whirled Service, it’s something I’ve been tinkering with in closely guarded secrecy for the past several months and was produced in collaboration with the vocalist and performance artist Franziska Lantz.  It’s also the official sequel to Ghosts Of Bush and was created using very similar techniques, though while that album was a fond farewell captured on analogue tape, Whirled Service is an entirely digital exploration in the bowels of the recently completed New Broadcasting House:

Opening with a montage of the building’s many language services (including Hausa, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Arabic to name but a few), we then hear time itself falter and slow as the sounds of the building gradually multiply and take over,  station idents, jingles, test-tones, air conditioning ducts, radiators, lifts, corridors, studios and postroom trolleys are all flipped inside-out and forced to sing. When dropped by two octaves the door buttons at the main entrance suddenly sound like a brace of foghorns mournfully calling across the sea, while the soporific movement of a fire safety door is like the creaking of a hull.

Regular Resonance FM listeners will probably remember Franziska Lantz for her long-running found-sound-and-text programme on the station, Drift Shift.  She was a natural choice for a collaborator as so much of her work uses different architectural spaces, including a current project creating percussive and vocal improvisations in an empty East London hospital which I’m probably not supposed to be telling you about yet. For this collaboration she worked with the original demos to create a series of beautiful vocal pieces which were then recorded inside the building itself, often in the stairwells at the rear of Broadcasting House to take advantage of the natural acoustics – the microphone placed two floors up.

These recordings of Franzi’s voice echoing through the stairwell was then incorporated back into the original tracks and given the same pitch-shifting and editing treatments as the initial recordings. In fact it’s often very hard to work out where her voice ends and the sounds of the building begin, though there are several places where she sings unaccompanied, sounding to my ears at least like Gregorian or Buddhist chanting!  She can also be heard singing along with the testing of the fire alarm at the beginning of part two,  and the result is one of my favourite moments in the project.

Ever the reverse-perfectionist, I would like to make it clear that no specialist equipment, expensive microphones or advanced computer effects were used over the course of these two ten-minute pieces. Everything you are hearing were created using objects and acoustic spaces found in New Broadcasting House and the music was produced simply by making adjustments in pitch and a small amount of editing.  No conventional instruments or computer plug-ins were involved, though we occasionally allowed ourselves a little reverb here and a spot of low-frequency oscillation there to bring certain elements to the fore and to prevent these entirely digital recording from sounding too dry. I realise that if I had a pound for every time I’d speculated on these pages about how little effort is often needed to create a “genuinely uncanny sound world”™ I could buy us all dinner, but that doesn’t make it any less  true or the sounds we found here any less remarkable. Perhaps this building already has a few ghosts of its own after all?

With this in mind, I hereby present My New Broadcasting House Sonically Interesting Top Ten,  or SITT.  I was originally planning a ‘Sonically and Hauntologically Interesting Top Ten’, but thought the better of it.

The SITT-Parade In No Particular Order:

• The squeaking microphone cradle of Studio 52A which, after the application of a smidgeon of reverb, sounds a bit like a cello.
• The weekly testing of the fire alarm and evacuation system, which goes on for about three hours in the middle of the night and sounds like the clarions of the apocalypse.
• A trolley purloined from the postroom badly in need of oiling. The postroom is staffed by obsessive record collectors and oldskool junglists, so convincing them to let me borrow it was a piece of cake.
• The freight elevator in which the aforementioned postroom trolley was recorded.
• The Broadcast Network Control System with it’s selection of tones and idents, all begging for a spot of the aforementioned LFO.
• The two microphones permanently on duty in the tower of Big Ben. Technically BBC property and accessed through the aforementioned BNCS panel in an NBH studio, so definitely not cheating.
• The ominously humming cupboard next to the canteen. Still no idea what’s going on in there.
• The  buzzers next to the revolving doors in reception, all pitched slightly differently for no apparent reason (now deactivated because everyone else found them hugely annoying).
• The fire door in the stairwell connecting the Peel Wing Reception to Basement Level 1, which doesn’t so much creak as evoke all the sadness in the universe.
• The beautiful voice of Franziska Lantz, recorded on the landing of the fifth floor of the rear stairwell as heard from the eigth floor. Not technically a feature of the building, but the sounds shaped her and she shaped them in turn, like a sort of sonic chicken-and-egg equation, only much better.

So, do please tune into BBC Radio 3 on Thursday 29th at 23:00 BST, where you’ll hear this new work several months in the making as well as the usual diverse mix, including work from Radiophonic Workshop legend David Cain and the sound of Brazil’s Urban Underground, all cooked up into a rich sonic stew by redoubtable host Mr. Nick Luscombe, himself an old Resonance stalwart:

Special thanks must go to Franzi for being such a pleasure to work with, Nick Luscombe and James Parkin for being such a pleasure to work for, Michael Rossi and Zoe Lukas for much appreciated help and enthusiasm and finally Danny Cox and Russell Newlove for letting me use their photographs on this posting. Greatly obliged to you all…

 

(Well, it worked for Boards of Canada…)

Happy Birthday to me. Oh, and don’t forget to order The Outer Church compilation out today!

It’s been an exciting few days for Howlround as we undertook our second-and-third-ever gigs on consecutive nights at venues several hundred miles apart, quite an achievement given the weight of the tape machines, the state of the Howlroundmobile’s suspension and a journey that consisted almost entirely of gingerly negotiating speedbumps.  Our first port of call was The Outer Church launch party for their new compilation on Front & Follow Records, where we were lucky to find ourselves playing alongside Hong Kong In The 60s (whom we also have to thank for these lovely photographs), Death & Vanilla and Cherry, all of whom provided such entertaining live sets that a lesser pair of tape loop manipulators might have found themselves wondering how they could possibly follow. Such feelings might have then been exacerbated by the fact that our carefully organised selection of tape loops fell into a gigantic tangle all over the stage roughly thirty seconds before showtime, resulting in our incorporating some rather chaotic accidental performance art into the set as we scrabbled around trying to restore them to order.  All grist to the haunted looms, of course.  Here’s a quick blast for your edutainment:

Proof that trouble rides a fast horse, we even got reviewed in Brighton’s premier Homes and Property Magazine/Blog The Latest!  Entirely fitting, given our work exploring empty and abandoned spaces, if you’ll forgive me hammering an analogy home:

Howlround live is two men playing with four tape loop machines, creating an incredible cacophony culled from the manipulated acoustic sounds of Bush House (the old home of the BBC World Service). The gig was somehow much more fun and enthralling than it sounds however, with some loud shuddering bass (emulating the scarier “ghosts” of Bush House) and some stunning moments of confluence where multiple tracks meshed together to create a beautiful drone. Imagine whale noises combined with echoes, delays and tape hiss. Despite a few technical hitches that slightly disrupted the hypnotic mood, the gig was strange, unique, haunting and enthralling.

Green Door Store, 25 July 2013
Rating: 
Joe Fuller

No rest for the wicked, of course, and once we had picked up the sorry remains of our live set from the floor it was off up north to the Full Of Noises Festival where we performed on the opening night alongside Felix Kubin, Lee Gamble, The ever-wonderful Bohman Brothers and Ryoko Akama, whose two small children, both cassette enthusiasts, were quite visibly appalled at our acts of loop vandalism which flew in the face of all the stern parental warnings they had even been given. And as loops were stretched across the room and flung haphazardly on the floor, it might have seemed that Mother knew best – they had received quite a trampling on the previous evening. Fortunately our machines and loops performed with exceptional fortitude and even proclaimed the highlight of the evening by certain members of the crowd, which given the quality of the line-up is very flattering but palpably untrue. Still, we were most chuffed. Here’s another quick edifying blast:

A programme of performances, workshops and talks, Full Of Noises is a most remarkable sonic arts festival in the very last place you would expect to find one – and as a native Cumbrian I feel qualified to say this. Personal highlights included John Dack’s lecture on the work of Pierre Schaeffer, and the following evening’s concert at St. James’ church featuring a wonderful piano piece by Tom James Scott and the ‘doom tuba’ of ORE. But of course my very favourite personal highlight was the appearance on the scene of my own dear parents who upon surveying the wreckage of our live set up broke with three decades of tradition by amending their favoruite phrase to ‘look at the state of your tape loops’ and insisted on straightening them all out before we made a mess of them all over again. Perhaps Mother really does know best after all.

Hope they’ll invite us back for more next year (the FON festival, that is, not my parents)
And do something about the speedbumps…

Now THIS is exciting. Well, for me, at least. But assuming you’re visiting this site of your own free will, you might just find it a teeny bit exciting too:

Finally a chance to shoe-horn in the punchline to my favourite Scarecrow-related joke on this website. And with good reason. For the people at blog-label-publisher-print-makers Caught by the River  have launched the latest edition of their fanzine An Antidote to Indifference. It’s a field-recordings special and it IS outstanding. You see? It totally works. Thanks, Scarecrow!

Edited by Cheryl Tipp, the Curator of Natural Sounds at the British Library, it’s packed with lots of highly readable goodies that have been spicing up my journeys on the tube no end over the last couple of days; featuring contributions from Jez riley French, The London Sound Survey, old mucker Jonny Trunk and Chris Watson. There’s even a small contribution from my Foggy self. Lovely artwork by Rose Foshall too.

Cheryl writes: Earlier in the year I was invited by Caught by the River to guest edit a special field recording edition of their fanzine, An Antidote to Indifference. The plan was to cover as many aspects of field recording as possible and give a broad overview of the current goings-on in this fascinating community. After spending a few months gathering mostly unique works from a variety of field recordists, sound artists and writers all engaged in their own ways with this diverse genre, I’d like to think that this has been achieved. Wildlife recording trips, urban soundscapes, sound maps, installations and personal reflections on recording experiences and the importance of listening are some of the topics covered. These pieces sit alongside a range of reviews, interviews, blog posts and other snippets of news. 

Your instructions are to pick up a copy here and also to check out the British Library’s Sound and Vision blog which is always a fascinating place to hang out. Those of you of a Tweeting disposition should follow @CherylTipp too.

In closing, I thoroughly endorse this product.

PS I’d also like to apologise to the citizens of Myanmar for not knowing it was another name for Burma. I think this constitutes a ‘Hashtag Fail’…

An extraordinary adventure last Saturday, witnessing The Foghorn Requiem, one of the strangest and most memorable musical performances I’ve ever encountered, standing with many hundreds of others on the cliff-top near the Souter Point lighthouse listening to horns of all sizes calling out to one another across the waves; then a mad cross-country dash while frantically editing in order to have my report ready for transmission on the World Service the following morning. Thankfully Virgin trains was running on time for once and my ridiculously over-priced ticket granted me access to a table and a power socket, so by the time my enormous fluffy microphone  and I arrived back in Euston, my three minutes destined for the morning’s editions of ‘Newshour’ were pretty much knocked into shape. I wrote a quick cue for the benefit of the presenters, made a final nip-and-tuck, gave it a metaphorical pat on the head, uploaded it onto the BBC server then fell asleep on the nightbus.

And so I’m very happy to say the following morning the Souter Point Foghorn was heard by an even greater number of people than the hundreds (thousands?) present on the shore,  those on board the huge Ferry that joined the flotilla of much smaller craft gathered off the coast, and of course the many, many thousands more within the horn’s reputed 20-mile range, who no-doubt cocked a quizzical ear to the skyline:

“For well over a century they brought comfort to some and terror to others, but in recent years the distinctive sound of the foghorn has all but disappeared from the UK coastline, rendered obsolete by modern technology. But yesterday the locals in South Shields in the North of England were treated to a sound that many thought had disappeared forever. The Souter Point Foghorn came out of retirement in spectacular fashion to lead a flotilla of ship’s horns and a sixty-piece brass band in an ambitious musical tribute to a vanishing tradition. Hundreds of spectators lined the cliff tops and covered their ears in anticipation. Foghorn expert Robin [The Fog] joined them”.

I’m not going to add too much more as I hope that the above does this ambitious event a reasonable amount of justice. Sarah Angliss, the Brighton-based composer, roboticist and all-round genius has written far more eloquently on the subject on her own blog than I could manage on this much sleep, so feel free to head over there and have a read. But I must offer huge congratulations to artists Lise Autogena, Joshua Portway and composer Orlando Gough, who worked so hard over the past couple of years to bring this incredible event to fruition. A few days before the performance Lise might indeed have commented ‘It’s crazy to work so hard for so long for something that only lasts fifty minutes’, but what an unforgettable fifty minutes they were. It began with the massed ranks of the Felling, Westoe and NASUWT Riverside Brass Bands slowly marching to their positions along the cliff path, a lone trumpeter atop the lighthouse itself and the specially-tuned horns that drifted in from the flotilla gathered off-shore. Thanks to Joshua’s unique technological innovations the musicians and ships horns were able to play in synchronisation in spite of the distances involved, creating the curious spectacle of ancient apparatus and ultra-modern GPS technology working together to serenade ‘the grand old man’.

Ah, yes, the ‘grand old man of the sea’. The title of this page comes from a comment made by one of the Newshour Editors attempts to describe the sound of the foghorn itself which was far better than anything I’d come up with – so I decided to steal it. It was no mere sound but an actual physical presence – it simply vanquished everything in it’s path. I was standing some reasonable distance from it’s distinctive twin mouths, but every time it sounded I discovered that my upper lip would twitch involuntarily for a few minutes afterwards, a sensation entirely new to me. Rather off-putting when you have hands full of microphones and nothing to steady it with. Mind you, compared to the large number of wailing children escorted to safety by their parents every time it blew, I thought I handled the whole thing rather manfully!

In spite of Orlando’s evocative score, the single most memorable moment was reserved for the the climax of the performance, when the foghorn gave everything it had in one final, epic, minute-long roar which managed the curious feat of being both ear-splittingly, spine-crackingly loud and incredibly moving. It was like the death-throws of some huge monster tearing out it’s lungs until there was nothing left but a whimper. As a sound it was both frightening and fabulous. As a metaphor for the local area’s slowly dying maritime traditions and ship-building history and of all the other foghorns up and down the land falling silent in turn, it was enough to bring tears to your eyes. Not so manful after all..

This recording I’ve made in no way does it justice. But how else could I explain?

Thanks should also go to Chris Weaver and Fari Bradley for their most valuable help, Connor Walsh for somehow being simultaneously adventurous and practical and Bernice, Debbie and the PR team for literally saving my bacon on the day. Well, not literally, but the pints will certainly be on me next time they find themselves in London. Perhaps they could bring my ears with them? I think I left them somewhere on that cliff-top…

I’ve now attained the fortunate position in life where as soon as any kind of cultural event themed around the subject of ‘Fog’ appears on the social calendar (both the phenomenon of fog itself and any object bearing qualities that could be classified as fog-like or fog-related), my inbox becomes awash with messages from well-wishers alerting me to it’s imminent arrival. And so when word spread that John Carpenter’s soundtrack to his 1980 creep-fest ‘The Fog’ was about to get the deluxe reissue treatment thanks to the folks at the Death Waltz Recording Company, it didn’t take my confidants long to join the dots. After all, as one of them pointed out, it’s my nom de plume. But frankly, who wouldn’t be excited about a double-heavyweight vinyl featuring a veritable glut of extra cues that never made the original release and artwork by a certain Dinos Chapman? Even the discs themselves looks pretty gorgeous:

While not a quivering mass of anticipation, it’s fair to say I was pretty jolly bouncy by the time I received the weblink to where the freshly minted release was said to be waiting for purchase. But unfortunately it proved to be a bad link in quite a number of ways, whisking me off-course to one of those weird holding pages that simply list a number of ‘related’ search topics that in reality seemed squarely aimed at desperately amoral middle-aged men. The internet seems convinced that whenever hunting for obscure vinyl, tickets to the theatre or flowers for mother proves fruitless, an extra-marital affair, a cure for baldness or a Thai bride is just the thing to soften the blow:

…And so today as I return from an admittedly enjoyable week of elicit encounters in a Static Caravan with a group of over-50s Playstation enthusiasts (don’t tell my Ukrainian wife!) it looks as if the curse has struck once again: The new pressing appears to be sold out everywhere and copies already selling for ‘Bugs Bunny Money’ on Discogs. The Fog has rolled out. Damn.

However, all this excitement caused me to reminisce on  the occasion a few years ago when I paid a visit to the lighthouse at Port Reyes on the Californian coast which served as one of the locations for the film. You might remember it as the location of DJ Stevie Wayne’s radio station (KAB, Antonio Bay) and I thought I’d include a few pictures here, NOT as a stroke of sulky hauntological one-upmanship, but purely because this particular part of America is one of the most staggeringly beautiful places I’ve ever visited. Alright, perhaps I’m sulking just a little bit…

As you can see, there would be very little room for a radio station in the lighthouse. I have a feeling those scenes were probably filmed elsewhere using the magic of editing. Inside there’s just about a enough room for the lamp itself and a nice lady in a US Parks uniform. I didn’t like to broach the question of cat-swinging, but in such cramped conditions I doubt we would’ve accomplished much.

Most exciting was the old engine room containing the fog horns. Despite the sunny weather the lighthouse’s horn was in operation when I visited, although of course  it’s just a modern electronic tone these days. There’s no way I would’ve stood this close if these horns had been in operation. And of course they wouldn’t have been positioned in-dooors:

Oh, California, you really are lovely. if it weren’t for the earthquakes and rattlesnakes I would move to you first thing tomorrow morning. Perhaps some nice US promoter on the West Coast fancies booking Howlround for a live tour? Just a suggestion…

Speaking of Foghorns somewhat closer to home, I hope you’ll be joining me in attending the Foghorn Requiem taking place this Saturday at Souter Point Lighthouse on the North-East coast. A gigantic composition featuring three brass bands and a flotilla of vessels out at sea, all lead by the incredible voice of the Souter Point foghorn, one of the few remaining working foghorns in the UK (no longer operational, but maintained for special occasions such as this), it’s the work of artists Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway with composer Orlango Gough and apparently new technology has been developed to enable ships horns several miles offshore to play in time with musicians on the shore. The performance starts at 12.30 on Saturday 22nd June and I shall definitely be there in my capacity as a fan of foghorns and also in my capacity as a broadcast journalist. In the meantime you can find further information by clicking the link above and get a teasing glimpse of just what the foghorn sounds like by watching this quite charming video that I found on youtube:

I’ve also been raiding the BBC Sound Effects database for foghorns again and thought you might like to hear one of my favourites. This very short but somehow instantly familiar recording was made in 1968 in Southampton Harbour, and that’s pretty much all I can tell you about it. Absolutely wonderful, though:

If all goes according to plan, things are going to get even more Fog-horny on these pages in the coming months. I think I can safely say it’s going to be ‘a blast’.

A noisy great blast.

Welcome to my Foggy Lounge. Pour yourself  into something comfortable and slip on a glass.

Yes, it’s yet another hand-picked selection of vinyl favourites, this time a more laid-back affair featuring some of my favourite library and easy-listening jams, designed to provide spiffing and leisurely accompaniment to an excitable crowd at a sold out show at Shoreditch’s hipster-hotspot Village Underground, waiting for an after-dinner set by those Public Service Broadcasting fellows. I would particularly urge you to savour this one, as many of these tracks are on LPs that are not normally allowed to leave the house and have now been filed back in my impenetrable vinyl dungeon. Indeed I spent the entire evening terrified that some sort of thievery (presumably by a telepathic crate-digger in a magic fishtail parka that gave him invisible powers) might occur if I took my eyes of them for more than a second, despite the fact that I was in a DJ booth surrounded by two sound engineers, a lighting guy and the chap whose headphones I’d borrowed. And of course not forgetting that speedy discrete getaways are quite hard to pull off when carrying a bag of records so heavy that you end up doing  a pretty convincing impression of the letter ‘S’. That said, if I ever catch the fellow who swiped my pristine Urban Shakedown 12″ back in 2001 it’ll be the absolute worst for him. I haven’t forgotten, oh no…

Fortunately this event wasn’t really an Urban Shakedown sort of an evening. More of a Gentle Urban Tie-Adjusting.

Thanks again to Willgoose and Wrigglesworth. Both of whom looked dapper as hell.