Heute, ich bin ein Berliner

Arriving by NastyJet at Berlin Schonefeld Airport, 25 miles south of the city (of course), I found a train into town and got off slightly randomly at the large interchange of Alexander Platz, with no clue how to get to the hotel or even where it was. I searched in vain for some time for a bookstore or news agents to buy a map.

The Platz had a vibrant winter-ish market selling a surprising array of lace, leather goods, tourist knick knacks, beer and sausage, funny pictures and hats. Well, the hats were sure funny.

Eventually I got back into the station and tried without success to find my hotel's address on a graffitied station map of the streets.

I thought at least proceeding further might help, not bothering about such detail as which direction I was travelling in, beaten up as usual by the Gatwick experience. 

(The compulsory binning of many of my toiletries in a lengthy, sullen interview that nearly caused me to miss the check-in, because the bottles were larger than 100mls; take-off delayed by half hour, chicken coop seat between sighing, snorting coughing man and student watching shooter movie on iPad; beer four quid for a warm mini-can).

It turned out I had got on the right line and train and that my random choice of descent was spot-on.

Things were looking up and before long I found the unexpectedly lovely Kunsthotel on LuisenStrasse which runs directly north of the station where I had descended, Friedrichstrasse.

An unpretentious mixture of bold and homely that Berlin seems to achieve so gracefully, of ancient charm and futuristic chic, the building straddles the very line of the wall whose destruction heralded the end of 28 years of brutal segregation between two opposed world political movements across the heart of a single city. 

In fact, one side of it was bricked and concreted over to prevent desperate Easterners gaining access and throwing themselves below onto the train tracks in a hopeless bid for the other side, sometimes jumping onto train roofs or scrambling amid gunfire across electrified tracks. 

It is barely possible to imagine this desolation of the spirit in such a place now. 

The eighteen foot ceilings and the trunks supporting the massive rustic wooden staircase surround a pointed weight, suspended seventy feet on an invisible wire, balanced perfectly at the centre spot. 

The halls are covered in impressionistic or erotic art and the communal bathroom I had so dreaded was in fact a super clean, large, light space with amazing showers. 

A giant smooth snake head looms at the over the lobby seats and the deep vine-draped courtyard is silent but for the rhythmic beat of swarming starlings far above.

Tomorrow, Friday 4th is the first day of the first conference of the European Sound Studies Association, "Functional Sounds", the reason for my return here, the first time not in a truck to move furniture up one of those courtyard staircases. Happy happy days!

I will report some of the speakers and ideas in my next post - looking forward so much to this!

My very first ever ever Radio show: not Steve Wright. "ROOM."

Hello folks, sorry to have been so long since adding to these pages, I know you've been busting for an update from my crazy escapades.

Well, good news is I've got a few posts coming in the next few days about all kinds of exciting stuff like GPS-led immersive soundwalks in Berlin,

the first ever conference of SoundStudies.EU, "Functional Sounds" from where I will be reporting each day for the next three days

and some of my own weird discoveries in the surprising and increasingly fascinating

Hampshire coastal town of Gosport,

where I have been making field recordings

First though, now it's no longer being broadcast, 

my show from September 2013, 

a reduced length, massively edited version, for headphones (or really lovely speakers) 

of a piece called "ROOM", made for the Hansard Art Gallery at the end of 2011. 

We used 14 speakers in four rooms and asked the audience to move around the space and explore. 

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In "ROOM" I took, as a starting point, 
Alvin Lucier's 1969 sound work 
"I am sitting in a room", 
developing ideas it suggests, 
but using a 21st century digital studio.

The original piece is based on 
the idea of a room's unique resonant characteristics 
gradually overwhelming the original recorded content, 
through playback and re-recording of the same initial sounds, 
again and again until no longer recognisable 
but transformed into a series of tones and pulses, 
the cadence of the spoken word 
gradually collapsed into a narrow band, 
like a dimly flickering flame.

The sounds of my own speaking voice (reading my own text) 
gradually become the 'instruments' of a virtual 'orchestra', 
in music that develops over time and across space, 
to simulate and distort reality in ways that are 
impossible in the physical dimensions.  

"Room" is an exploration of musical composition as 
the building of virtual physical structures which the listener may enter, 
taking changing routes to build shifting impressions of a sonic landscape.

Here is a reduction from physical to virtual space of the composition ROOM, 
which explored uses of the voice as a sound source 
whose 'meaning' or character was related to but distinct from 
any meaning imparted by the text.

As the text unravels, 
folds over itself, 
becomes truncated, looped, distorted and overlaid 
with itself and other sources, 
flashes of memory and premonition interfere, disrupt, distort. 

It is like a journey in an open car through a dark landscape, 
peopled with versions of the sensory world and 
the liminal spaces between 
'reality' and a sleeping reinvention of it.
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Imagine music you could enter and explore, or wear like an invisible atmosphere, 


the instruments and singing voices in the air about them like dust particles 
that dart and race in the sunlight or the heavenly bodies themselves, 
after millennia of straining, audible to human ears.

Consider the musical composition a physical object 
which if given spatial dimensions, 
you may enter and examine at will.

If words are only labels symbols for an idea of a thing, 
may they not also serve as musical notes, which are the same?

Is a sound any more or less meaningful than a word?  

What is its interaction with the space in which it is heard?

The relationships between 
   - the sound, 
   - the space in which it resonates and 
   - the imaginative associations of the listeners 
combine to create a wild thing that has no name, 
cannot be captured or described, 
is only experienced 
by one person, 
once. 

Isn't that a mystery beyond understanding?

If Futurism and Modernism are dead 
and post-Modernism still doesn't know exactly what it is, 
long live the ambiguous fecundity of the present.


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Alongside composing for classical instruments, I have worked 
first with tape recordings and 
latterly, with audio montage in the digital studio 
for eighteen years, in search specifically of two things.

Firstly, using the digital studio to create 
simulations of human performance 
in explorations of musical ideas that 
would be impossible for actual players to achieve.

Secondly, as a result of this, 
the creation of virtual environments within the sound 
that are transformed and juxtaposed, interwoven 
in ways that could not be achieved in the physical dimensions.  

I believe that sound is as richly potent an expressive form as the verbal lexicon, 
in and in spite of its conditioned associations and with its scope for 
extension, subversion, flexing, demolition and restructuring 
in the image of the wordless visions of hallucination and dreaming.

For this reason I have been exploring the simulation of acoustic environments in which 
the sound appears to be produced, 
just as film makers are concerned with finding and adapting location 
and theatre designers of creating perfect stage sets, 
tightly appropriate to the purpose of their narrative.

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Postcard from the Woods

Sunday, 11th August 2013, 4 pm
by the river, in front of The Anglers Arms, Bishopstoke SO50 6LQ


I was trying this morning, in my garden, to read Slavoj Zizek's "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously". Trying and somewhat failing to understand a Marxist interpretation of the current geo-political condition, I decided to get my spanners out, fix my half-ruined ancient bike and ride it somewhere far away.

Setting off along the river Itchen, a few yards from my new home, I followed its winding course upstream, through Riverside park, golden green and filled with ambling families, kayakers on the river. Swaythling, under the motorway and into fields.

Somewhere along the way, proceeding I knew not exactly where, other than roughly north, on a rutted, root-bobbled, woodland path, I started to hear a kind of work-song, a blues chant that built upon itself before shifting tangentially.

The route led out of the woods, alongside a barbed wire fence to a shit-piled, bumpy, furrowed pasture where riding was harder than walking. I got off and walked. I got lost, then stuck, at a dead end of fences and high grass.

Turning back, I saw two distant brightly coloured teeshirts, a couple resting under trees. As I approached to ask them the way I found they had vanished.

Near the spot where they had seemed to sit, I found a kissing gate, a cattle-gridded bridge and a steep gravel climb to a thronging play area, full of ice cream and grizzling toddlers.

A sort of piratical Nicholas Cage (many piercings and tattoos, resplendent greased quiff, expensive round, brown, gold-rimmed shades) directed me back the way I had come for the requested Itchen Navigation path.

So I took the other way, finally back to the ancient waterway after a five mile cowpat-deep detour.

The sun shines on my loneliness and fear, evaporating it with steady, unceasing action.

In my bag are raspberries and sausage rolls. The road ahead seems shorter than before.

I will take the train home from Winchester, apparently some 8 miles off and compile the Postcard from the Woods that I heard as I bounced through the wood.

[ I found this figure to be wildly optimistic, after three hours of sweating, clunking forwards but cannot offer an accurate alternative. Perhaps 14 or 16 more in all was closer to it ]


8 pm
Garden of South Western Arms, Adelaide Rd, Southampton SO17 2HW

My phone's map software reckons 13 miles from here (one yard from my house) to Winchester.

I reckon I rode 25, due to detours, back-tracking and the wildly meandering waterway woodland paths.

I didn't know the age of it, assuming C18th like most of our canals.

Therefore I was amazed at a plaque below Bishop's Bridge stating the Romans established the city in 70 AD and constructed the section of the navigation that runs there around that time, to prevent the river flooding. A huge engineering feat, in any age.

I remembered childhood picture books of anchored rafts with huge lead weights winched up wooden chutes as pile drivers for three men to wind and drop, hammering tree trunks into the bed of the Thames for platforms to build the first, wooden, London Bridge.

Approaching Winchester via Compton, pausing atop the bridge crossing the magnificent and shocking M3 motorway, then continuing up and down steep hills then suddenly across the top of a meadowy valley, the Victorian viaduct below, to which I then swooped and crossed.

Passing the 12th century Hospital of St Cross, its half-ruined enormity bespeaking the ancient humanitarian and self-organising power that the city always evokes as I enter it.

Cycling on the flat, through green woodland paths at the edge of the town walls, I circle Winchester College and regain the water's side, approaching Bishop's Bridge.

Stopping to eat sausage rolls and raspberries from my bag, I realise my legs are feeling very used, shaky and shocked.

I resolve to do this more and more, to see if I can pass hills as effortlessly again as all the lycra boys, always moving ahead like trains while I shuffle and grunt up a slope.

Up the High Street, under the statue of King Alfred, alongside a confusing cordon, turning out to be for an athletic event, a cycle race.

I feel both left out of a club and nonchalantly smug about my own petit tour.

If only lycra didn't make me look like a fish in a bag.

Last, thigh-burning, climb to the train station at the top of the town hill, buying a can of cider and a ticket, I discover the train to my new home's doorstep is five minutes away.

Blissful recline under the lowering sun's undiminished brilliance, I laugh to recall the sometimes desperate thoughts of perdition, of never arriving, of punctures and river tumbling on foot-wide sections of sloping mud that my ancient town bike handled like a husky.

Fabulous old rusty bike, thank you very much for a lovely day.

Here is the music I imagined, clunking and wobbling over the tiny rutted paths between cows watching and swans not, the eternal outflow of a thousand subterranean mouths, flickering sun dappling the water through swaying willow leaves, carpets of butterflies that scattered like fairies before my approaching wheel:

A brief history of futures past: musical exploration of the impossible

I've been digging through a long-ignored tape cassette collection with which I have moved house around a dozen times in fifteen years and yet haven't listened to since before around 2000.

Remembering the essential octagonal bic biro, for pulling up slack, to prevent the whole thing being chewed in the doggy jaws of an old tape player. 

I'm trying to compile a story from unearthed bits and pieces I composed or recorded or wrote a long time ago. 

The story is this: 

why the ‘bebop-romanticism-klezmer-highlife-cinta-baroque’ hybridity that I tried first to transcribe then to convey to academy-trained musicians, for them to play on a stage in front of an audience of at most a hundred expectant classical-canon conformists 

turned into 

simulating impossible, acoustic, performance with early commercial digitalia

then into 

collecting sounds on the street and recompiling the street inside an enclosed space, with glimpses of  the original hybrid crowd's voices

then

finding ways to walk inside it so it's always different, unrepeatable.

I’m still working on telling that story through some peculiar digital sound objects and rambling, utterly inappropriate words.

<.~<.~<.~ <.~<.~<.~ HTTP://BASIC.FM  ~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>

<.~<.~<.~ Watch this space for my first radio broadcast  ~.>~.>~.>

<.~<.~<.~ on augmented reality and music composition  ~.>~.>~.>

<.~<.~<.~ <.~<.~<.~ S e p t e m b e r  2 0 1 3  ~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>

Meanwhile, I discovered some striking archaeological evidence of the 'shift', the evolution out of learning to play the standard repertoire in a regional orchestra, through keeping up with incredible street bands in Belgrade, Budapest and Paris, and capturing live events for the bubbles to build fleeting dreamscapes in sound.

A major influence on my shift away from notes on paper for people, toward the construction of musical junk-sculpture, was the improvising pianist John Law. 

Nearly twenty years ago, I went into a large echoey room with a Steinway, intending to record my Piano Sonata.

A master of digression and procrastination, even then, I instead recorded this. 

Exhibit A: “In Walked John Law”, solo piano improvisation, September 1994