The console in the studio is a loosely assembled still life composition comprising paints, palettes, Nurofen packets, spectacles cases, lithium batteries, lino cutting tools, paint streaked towels, ink bottles, brushes, scalpels, half spent candles.
Last year, the books which are an ever present feature of the studio desk were directly related to music and sound making, music theory, notation, biographies of Part, Cage, Ligetti, Dowland, Tallis.
At present, the books littering the surface comprise atelier textbooks for drawing and painting, a journal of experimental watercolour approaches, exhibition catalogues for Turner and Munch, and a theoretical appraisal cum meditation on Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape.
The evidence would suggest that I have, at least for the timebeing, changed direction and have given up on music. To an extent this is true. I haven’t turned on the study computer in over a month for any other duty than to complete mastering jobs for other people. But I don’t feel removed from what I still consider to be a single, unified process. Whatever reading I am immersed within concerning chiaroscuro, form and value, whatever biographical data I assimilate regarding fieldwork sketches, discussions, readings, and atelier/studio processes seems entirely relevant to the activity of the sound studio and the recording process – my recording process.
The philosophical emergence of romanticism outlines an approach and a process, and defines the nature of the output – in terms that remain intact regardless of medium. The borders between the immediate foreground and the sublime, mysterious background made manifest by obscurity, autoscopy.
E. M. Forster; “Only connect”
Whist the GRM tools and AudioEase filters do their work on an audio signal passing from channel to aux and from aux back to recording track, I prime a few pages with a view to capturing watercolour impressions of clouds and light abstracting the steep face of a French alp. The audio signal is a transposition of De Pacem Domine and is suited well enough to the mountain landscape still fresh in my memory from last week’s holiday. I am eroding the composition. I am considering a painting which erodes the mountain and manifests as an abstract send of light, movement and fear. Similarly, the audio collage will, ideally, evoke the same emotive responses.