LMYE Redux

The ever supportive Lend Me Your Ears site ran a nice little feature on me this week which you can see here. Julian also featured long term associate TVO this week here.

On TVO chat, his FACT top 10 got published here in which he namechecks Ghost Frequencies.

In less cool news, I got a lovely ukuelele for my Christmas so am considering giving up the drones in favour of some twee strumming action (not really, it is fun though).

Hope you are having good festive times and stuff, I’m still battling off a hefty dose of man-flu, feel free to forward me your sympathies //sadface.

Speak soon.

D

Ghost Chatter

Quite a few bits of news from me this week.

Broadcasting on Ghost Frequencies made the man-legend that is The Village Orchestra’s end of year honours list that he was asked to put together for FACT. I don’t think it’s officially posted yet keep em peeled for that. The podcasts are also well worth a punt, great site, good content, nice outlook on things. here

Also linked in with TVO, this month’s Wire magazine features a full page feature on the man along with a couple of my photo’s of him making this my first international published photo credit. Yayy.

Still dragging it’s phantom self around, a nice little review of Ghost Frequencies arose today on Sonomu courtesy of Steven Fruitman.

“This excellent work was inspired by a bit of quackery known as the ‚ÄùGanzfeld Procedure‚Äù in the field of parapsychology. A subject is blindfolded and equipped with a pair of headphones playing nothing but white and pink noise ‚Äì static. Out of this aural assault, it is hoped the subject will discern patterns, maybe even hear voices. Maybe even real voices from the past.

More than science, it sounds like a relative to Victorian fancies like fairy photography or Edison´s attempts to hear the voices of the dead via the radio, optimistic hopes that new technology might reveal previously hidden worlds, or at least reveal the otherwise hidden beings that share ours with us.

As music, however, Broadcasting on Ghost Frequencies sits four-square in the contempary field of drone music, which for all its different forms also wishes to put the listener in a contemplative mood, from which he or she will often hear things that are not really there. Or are, but very subtly so.

Erstlaub¬¥s fifty-minute piece appears to be playing the role of the input ‚Äì the static barrage ‚Äì and the output – the shapes and colours the mind suggests might appear out of the the flat, prickly monotony. Because he certainly shows an intervening hand by creating sound events which rise and fade away, or are consumed by the greater drone, with regularlity.

In fact Dave Fyans of Perth, Scotland, the man behind the attractive monicker (”first leaves”), proves a very talented composer in a field where patience and taste, knowing just when to change the pitch, send in a reverberating spiral, or add a new thread to the weave of the main drone, is the mark of an artist.

It is really quite beautiful, balancing between both stark and lush in some inexplicable – paranormal? – manner.

http://www.movingfurniturerecords.com” from here.

Finally, I am pleased to be able to announce that I will be breaking cover for a rare live performance on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at the Bowery in Edinburgh as part of the very interesting looking Hidden Door Festival. They are in the process of updating their site so I’ll post more details and times as they are solidified. I will be playing an entirely new set (which I’m also in the process of making visuals for) which at the moment may or may not be floating around in my head with the title of “Sleepwalking into the Underworld” but I can’t be sure yet.

Have a nice holiday season or whatever,

D

The Horsemen Crept In At Midnight

So, latest artschool shenanigans has been an audio project. Having never used ProTools before I threw myself at it and mostly got my head around the nuts and bolts, yeah it’s a bit funky sometimes with the way it deals with things but all in all, not a terrible bit of software. I picked up an Mbox 2 Mini which is a surprisingly solid little bit of kit considering its pricetag. It’s nice just to have a very portable, bus powered interface that can phantom power my AKG C1000s and handle a few ins and outs.

I decided that I should strive to try something well outside my usual methods of working so decided to go or pure audio collage give or take. Here’s a brief write up for it. I should point out that it’s entirely non-commercial and for educational purposes so if I stole a little bit of audio from you, please don’t sue me (Conet Project).

“The Horsemen Crept in at Midnight

an audio project by d.fyans (tbadf lvl2)

This is an audio piece produced in Pro-Tools using a variety of different sound sources to convey a narrative. A combination of offline processes and insert effects were used along with traditional editing techniques.

The piece is inspired by the Foley Art, ‘Threads’, ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ and Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’.

The concept is a short, imaginary documentary piece based around the idea of a nuclear bomb being dropped in the UK and after a period of time, nature enduring in the absence of human intervention.

Sources/Equipment

Equipment

Macbook Pro
Pro-Tools 8le
Mbox Mini 2
Piezo contact microphone
AKG C1000s Condenser microphone
Zoom H4 Portable Stereo Recorder
Nord Modular G2

Sources

Bottle top
Coins
Lighter
Hundreds + Thousands
A4 Paper
Computer Keyboard
Field recording taken at Dunino Den
Field recording of city ambience
Number Station recordings (found sound)
GMT ‘Pips’ from GMT Website (found sound)
Chimes of Big Ben (found sound)”

I can’t really say how I feel about this project. In terms of ‘sound art’ it’s less creative than my usual sound works. It was interesting to try and paint in a very literal narrative using a variety of sound, it seems to be something that I can handle quite comfortably but, in honesty I prefer to keep it more smoke and mirrors and abstract. We’ll see where this one goes I guess.

D

ps

If you made it this far down, well done, I decided to add in a little cutup rastery kinda vibe based on bits chopped in ProTools out of my daily commute, only cut, nothing else apart from the big mongy timestretch at the end, gotta love those mongy timestretches. It’s really just a wee sketchy thing.