Robin The Fog

Look what turned up on my doorstep this morning:

Actually, that’s a falsehood. When I say ‘doorstep’ I mean the quiet corner of Broadcasting House that I’m secretly running a record label from. And it didn’t just ‘turn up’ of its own accord, I wheeled it there on a hastily-purloined trolley that nearly took a few people’s feet off. And, if I’m honest, it was actually yesterday. But none of this is really important. What I want to impart with all this is the news that the vinyl copies of the second Howlround LP Secret Songs Of Savamala have finally arrived, just in time for the official release date on 16th September. And I have to say they’re looking even lovelier than I dared hope. I honestly thought that nothing could top Lisa Hack and Hannah Brown’s beautiful sleeve art for Ghosts Of Bush, but having finally got my hands on the finished product I really think Milica Nikolic’s highly atmospheric cover shots make it a close call. Take a look for yourself:

I have to confess to being a very proud and happy Fog right now. Thanks to all those good folk too numerous to mention who have already snared themselves a pre-ordered copy at the special-discount-early-bird rate of £10. You surprised me with your enthusiasm and you’re going to surprise my local post-mistress even more with your sheer bulk and volume. Despite this, you will all be receiving your records and accompanying downloads in the mail (and email) sometime in the next week. For the rest of you, this is your LAST CHANCE to take advantage of this extremely reasonable price, because from the release date on Monday it gets more expensive! And apart from the cost-factor there are only 300 copies for the world, which are selling fast. And this time there will be NO REPRESSES! Click here to get your copy before it’s too late!

Thanks also to those who came down to The Spanish House in Belgrade last week and made the official launch event such a memorable occasion. If you’ve been following my antics over the last few months you might remember that this is where this whole thing started, down in the flooded basement beneath the ruins listening to my new friends conjuring up ghostly echoes armed only with voice and spanner. To be able to return months later and play the sounds back into the very space where they were recorded was for me a very special and symbolic moment, and I was very glad that so many of my Belgrade friends came down and joined me for the occasion. Now transformed into an arts pavilion with the basement safely-but-sadly sealed-off, the ruins have undergone significant changes even since those snowy days back in April, making the album a time capsule of yet another lost moment in it’s long and chequered history. As the unholy metallic chimes and deep bass pulses swirled once again around crumbling walls eerily lit for the occasion, Milica Nikolic’s raggedly beautiful photos building and the local area were projected onto an exposed concrete pillar.

It really felt as if we were bringing the ghosts home…

I would also like to thank a very special group of people, without whom this album simply would not have happened, particularly Leila Peacock, Axel Humpert, Ana Djordjevic-Petrovic and the staff of Camenzind Belgrade for inviting me to take part in their amazing project. The first issue of their magazine, featuring essays and photographs of Savamala (including The Spanish House in it’s former glory) is now available and issue two will follow very soon. Thanks also to NO-FM, which is rapidly becoming a genuine radiophonic force; and particulalry to Boba Stanic and Nicola Markovic for allowing us to use The Spanish House and trusting us with the keys!

But the most gratitude is reserved for my co-conspirators Mirjana, Anita and Milica for bringing me to their ‘temple’, for providing vocals, percussion, photography; and, above all, their deathless and infectious enthusiasm. Ladies, you are each an inspiration and I’m so glad to have worked with you. This is your album too:

…I’m just sorry I won’t be able to pay you!!

It’s odd to finally be here after so many months of alternate tinkering and procrastination, and with launch date approaching rapidly I do find myself wondering what people will make of Secret Songs Of Savamala. It’s something of a departure from Ghosts Of Bush, but also, in its way, a natural successor. It’s a slightly darker, more minimal record, very much a ‘winter’ album and I think you will get a real sense of just how cold it was inside the building when we were making the recordings; with the occasional howl of a blustery wind, the dripping of melting snow and Mirjana and Anita’s voices hanging in the icy air. Of course what connects these two LPs is that once again, these are simply the sounds of the space. No artificial reverb, no computer effects, just the sound of voices on concrete, metal on rust and ripples on floodwater. It may well be Howlround’s most evocative work yet. Isn’t that right, Scribbleface?

Am i allowed to talk about how lovely @RobinTheFog‘s new record is before it’s even been released? hmmmm

— hannah brown (@scribbleface) August 28, 2013

(Just so you know, I didn’t pay her either…)

What a wonderful thing to have such good friends, eh?

I can’t promise our launch event will ‘bring down the house’ as a combination of poor maintenance and lack of funding has already achieved this. But it’s most exciting to be able to play back the album inside the ruins of the very building where it was recorded! There’s a Facebook Event page too for those of you who enjoy such things. All are warmly welcomed…

Thanks to Ana Djordjevic-Petrowycz for the poster design and, once again, to Milica Nikolic McKitis for the beautiful album artwork!

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…