I remember Steve Reichs ‘Come Out’ being used as a sinister accompaniment to a scene in the tv show Devs where the only sound was the piece. Repetition can be frightening.
Hauntology. Broadcast & The Focus Group.
Silence is like being submerged in darkness. Builds tension and leaves the imagination. Underneath is a scene from Under the Skin.
Not much of observation on sound, but, I find horror games are scarier than films due to interaction. When paired with visually disturbing thing images or scenes I think that silence is the most effective way to make the situation more frightening. In the audiobook of Steven Kings The Stand that I listened to last year, there is a chapter where the character Larry Underwood has to walk through the pitch-black 1.5 mile long Lincoln Tunnel that is littered with corpses. I remember this as being very tense and somewhat frightening, however this fear was not through sound but the narrative.
For the upcoming project, we were told to create a piece of work on the theme of dreams. I decided to do mine on a dream that I remember from last year.
The content of this dream – or rather, nightmare – can be read in the following script which I will be reading as the central part of the work.
The misty pond was surrounded by a thick wilderness of bulrush. On the far side of the pond, a grand old willow stretched out above the lake like an old man's hand, its leaves combing through the surface of the water. The water was coated in a thick scum of tundra coloured algae that moved as some amorphous being, littered with natural debris. I thought I saw a figure underneath the shading tree, washing some cloth or fabric, but as the breeze blew the branches, the apparition was no more.
I turned and stood facing the derelict old building. One of the two towering wooden doors was ajar, and I went in, submerging myself in darkness, as the grand door shut behind me in silence.
This damp room was small, with contorted walls that leaned and bowed like ancient trees.
They were spotted with black mould. The peeling scab of wallpaper looked like a discarded newspaper in the puddle of a gutter. Its once luxurious azure gleam only now made the walls viler and colder in this dark dank tomb.
These walls, rising to oblivion, had no end. The ceiling - if such a term is applicable - was an endless inverted well, a great void of black.
I was then aware of the sound of footsteps.
In front of me, another door, much less grand, began to move as the handle turned.
The door slowly opened to a figure with a candlestick in hand. A pale veiled woman in a white nightgown.
She stood with her wet black hair dripping, sending trails of inky black down her cold robed body.
In her right hand, a blood-stained rag dripped, rhythmically, forming a puddle at her peculiar feet.
Her blue lips unmoving, the wind whistled through the cracks of the walls.
“I am your guide.”
I asked:
“Where are we going?”
SILENCE
“Where are we going?”
SILENCE
“Where are we going?”
SILENCE
“To the bottom of the lake”
The candle flame began to flicker. The walls creaked and cracked. The once whispered wind wailed wild.
The lady snapped back her head, teary red eyes wide and shrieked a banshee's cry.
END
This dream was likely subconsciously inspired by my reading of ghost stories by M.R James, and a specific scene from Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975).
I have read some of “The Weird and the Eerie” by Mark Fisher, and hope to eventually elaborate on this, as well as on the Hauntology of “Ghosts Of My Life”.
Mirror (1975)
Elements of the dream, such as the lady talking through the wind, the bloody cloth and ‘peculiar feet’ have been dramatised and expanded upon after reading about the mythology of the Banshee, Caoineag, Bean-nighe, Cyhyraeth and the Midnight Washerwomen.
While researching Banshees, I came across the traditional Irish and Scottish practice of keening, a form of vocal lament for the dead.
This led me to spend time researching Alan Lomax, an ethnomusicologist, musician and folklorist.
The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.
Alan Lomax
Folklore can show us that this dream is age-old and common to all mankind. It asks that we recognize the cultural rights of weaker peoples in sharing this dream. And it can make their adjustment to a world society an easier and more creative process. The stuff of folklore—the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of the people can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, “You are my brother.”
Alan Lomax
Lomax talks about local cultures as something that should be maintained through the diversity of culture, in opposition to the oppression of cultural hedgemony that occurs through nationalism and the concept of universal popular culture. He calls this cultural equity.
I also found the British Library Sound Archives (available on https://sounds.bl.uk/) to be a great resource for a number of archived conversations on local ghost stories across the UK.
Natural Snow Buildings (formed 1998) are a duo that creates unique music blended between post-rock, free/psychedelic/ritual folk, drone and ambient.
Their album Daughter of Darkness clocks in at 7 hours 20 of material with single tracks ranging from 5 minutes to 45. The structure of each ‘song’ is generally centred around a droning guitar/dulcimer-esque theme ( with a heavy bed of echo/delay, distortion) that repeats, sometimes subtly changes over time. Many songs become more ritualistic with chanting, shakers and drums. Their albums are often quite overdriven and lo-fi, contributing to the improvised folk aesthetic.
Grouper
Grouper is the solo project of artist, musician, singer-songwriter and producer Liz Harris who makes reverb-heavy psychedelic folk. Acoustic in nature, the majority of her music is drowned in reverb to the point that the vocals become part of the instrumental.
Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
The double album – A I A : Dream Loss and Alien Observer – saw more of an ambient focus and is a personal favourite of mine.
In context
In my radio piece, I will be using convolution reverbs, to give the soundscape a sense of place. I’ll use a long decay to make the room seem larger due to the impossibly tall ceiling and to accentuate the wet (dripping water) sounds.
At the current moment, I’m not sure how to implement music in my piece. The music in the dramatisations of M.R. James in the BBC Radio Collection that inspired my dream often came across as quite cliched, with the sounds of waterphones and strings.
I will likely use synthesis to create drones inspired by the film, The Innocents, what I watched last year and have previously written about.
Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant.
In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Centro de Cultura Digital, V&A, Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Pompidou Centre, Venice Biennale, Maxxi and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
Vicki’s work was technically good and humorous in a witty kind of way.
I asked Vicki about the politics of her work. I was interested in what she would say on her opinions regarding copyright and if she had ever gotten in trouble for it.
She said that she tries to keep out of the political side of her work. I found this slightly frustrating personally as in my opinion her work shows the connection of creations and is against copyright but at the same time she then tries to be neutral perhaps in order to still maintain permission to use material in her work. Her work seems to be more of a commodity than something radical, where I believe it’s roots lie. Maybe I’m just being a bit mean, what isn’t entirely intentional – I think her work is entertaining and the majority have lots of effort put into them.
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I have previously read about plunderphonics and names like John Oswald and Negativland. The term Culture Jamming was coined by Negativland member Don Joyce:
“As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard… directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.”
Culture Jamming itself is routed in the Situationist International theory of détournement – the idea of turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself/ countering the recuperation that occurs in mainstream culture.
