Musically Notable is back from a new music hiatus with this masterful piece of sound art. Get your headphones out, readers, you're going to want to hear this in high-def.
Embedding has been disabled for this video, but check it out on Soundcloud!
"Collections" is a binaural project that is stunningly entertaining to listen to. (Binaural: the process of making audio mimic the way sound travels around your head, allowing you to discern which direction the sound is coming from, via recording or post-production techniques.) I got a chance to talk to Anne Louise Kershaw about her project and ask her what "Collections" is all about.
What was your inspiration for this project, who was it for?
Both Mass & Salvage were sound installations created as part of the Collections exhibition which myself, Helen Mather and Kate Freeborough did as part of Free For Arts Festival Manchester. Helen created Collage for the exhibition while Kate worked live in the space fort he duration of the exhibition. We devised the idea for an exhibition that explored collections as it is something we were each interested in in different forms, what we collect, how we collect and what a space collects over time. We wanted to create work that was both site responsive and mutually responsive.
Our proposal for the festival was accepted, but it wasn't until we had found a location to hold the exhibition at that we could really begin to develop work for it, as the space provided the backbone for what we were exploring in terms of collections. With the exhibition being held in a church, I looked at what I felt I had collected over time in terms of religion. I am an atheist, but was raised as a Catholic. There is a lot about religious ritual and routine that I see as having influenced my life and behaviours. Patterns, ocd, movements, ways of doing and saying things that I feel have been generated based on a routined and habitualistic was of living, very much promoted by religious life and habit.
"Mass" was played on a three hour continual loop in the main body of the church and explores the external ideas and ideologies that I/we collect, accumulate, absorb, take on board and carry as our own rituals and habits, bearing the weight, assimilating the mass.
"Salvage" played in the 'quiet room' of the church (at great volume) and examines internal mechanisms, methods and desires to transform such collections to rescue, to restore, to save, to start anew, to make our own.
I really wanted to look at what we choose to collect over time? And whose collection is it? Both in a positive and a negative sense, whose are these collections we carry with us through our life, and what will we chose to do with them?
-How did you go about amassing sounds to create this project?
The project was created using Logic Pro on my Mac. I habitually collect sounds (suitable considering the theme of the project) and so have a lot to draw from, however with this project being so specific, I started a new collection of sounds based on specific movements and items I wanted to feature in the piece. I recorded a lot of the sounds using my Tascam DR-05. I like to experiment with how I can affect the sounds I record on that. Running with it, recording it inside objects to generate effects, moving, intentionally scuffling sounds etc which I record. For the sounds that I used that I wanted to be clean and high quality, I use my partner's mic as he is a musician and sound artist has a lovely Rode mic. We often use the hallway of our house as a makeshift sound booth, affecting the acoustics of the space with materiel and padding, or hard objects to create reverberation of sound. I spent a lot of time in the hallway working my way through movements, habits, rummaging through things i've collected and things I do which I see as new collective versions of old habits and routines etc, which he recorded. I took all of these tracks into logic pro and developed the piece from there. Often as and when an idea comes into my mind i'd go and get that recording, building the piece sonically and thematically as I went. Very much like creating a sonic poem or collage.
-Did you encounter any difficulties with recording and production? Was the binaural effect done through recording or post-production?
I didn't really encounter any difficulties as such, though there were a few things I had to consider. Firstly, I had to make sure the production of the pieces suited the spaces they were being played in – one being the main space in a fairly large church, the other being a closed room. Secondly I had to bear in mind that as I wanted the sound of the two pieces to bleed, I did not want this bleeding to be routine (as that did not fit thematically with what I was exploring). The two pieces were installed in the space and to be played for the duration of the exhibition opening. Some people, such as Kate Freeborough, who was working live in the space for the full duration, would hear the sound installations for 3 whole hours. I wanted the bleed to work both sonically and thematically and for the pieces to never repeat, I had to focus on the timing of my looped pieces for this, and to work on the loops themselves adding in an element of random to the routine and looped pieces.
The binaural effect was something that I did both pre and in production. A lot of the recordings I made using the DR-05 were done using different methods to create that aural effect. For example on Mass there is a full length vocal that was recorded with the DR-05 recording from within a pint glass that I slowly rotated in front of my mouth as I spoke. Similarly, though using a different technique, on Salvage, again using the DR-05, I recorded myself running, passing the DR-05 around my body as I ran, often close to my body skimming my clothes, underneath my arm, close to my mouth then far away again generating a cyclical aural aesthetic. Other effects were developed through the processing of the tracks, in pieces as I built them. Although we can get pretty much any effect when producing a track in a program like logic pro, I really like to experiment with ways to alter and adapt a sound whilst recording it, I’ve created some really unusual and effective sounds this way, and found that the altered frequencies allows for even further and more unexpected outcomes that can be really sonically exciting, and very specific and personal.
***You can catch up with Anne on Twitter, @Anne_L_Kershaw, on her Soundcloud, or on her website. As always, if you know of notable new music, give me a shout on Twitter @AngelinaPanozzo!***
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