Listen to the april mixtape | Listen to the april liner notes (spoken word)
29th March 2025
Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics
00’00 Lumps of hail batter the rooflight above my head as I sit in my studio, waiting patiently in the queue to speak to someone at the DVLA call centre in Swansea. You should be thankful that I’ve spared you the guitar solo. I listened to twenty minutes of it. Twice.
Untitled #32. The muzak is ruptured by a bland and robotic female English voice: “If you would like to speak in Welsh please say ‘Welsh’, otherwise tell us how we can help you today.” I prepare to speak to a human. An oscillator rumbles through a rough kind of bassline. I am rustling and bustling about the kitchen, opening jars, creaking. Thud. Thud. Clap. Thud. Triplets of maracas. If you would like to speak in Welsh. Please. Say. Welsh.
In January 2021 I was fortunate enough to sit in on a university lecture given by Annea Lockwood over Zoom to some students of sound art. I think it was the first time I ever consciously thought about ‘field recording’ as a discipline or a practice in itself, rather than as a thing you did to get material to chop up and load into a sampler. One of Lockwood’s mottos is LET A SOUND COMPLETE ITS LIFE.
“Having recorded its beginning, let it complete itself and see where it goes. That, as a process, is already working with shape”, “Ask yourself what in the sound deals with ‘life’?” Lockwood is enthralled by environmental sound recordings because, if she is patient and waits around, she gets to hear what happens. This open-ended, unhurried, sensuous way of thinking about sound recording heavily influenced my original idea for the monthly mixtape series, which was, at its outset, full of 12-minute-long recordings of the woods, meadows and seas. And because I no longer owned a sampler and wasn’t in the business of making one-shots, it all seemed to fit with my practice as a package rather neatly.
But then idkkkk … winter happened!? There’s fuck-all going on in winter. And there was the grid in my DAW, kind of winking at me, inviting me to enter a BPM. That was back in January. The monthly mixtapes I’ve done this year do seem more like they’re the right shape and I think that’s to do with repeating and collaging sounds against the grid a bit more (like I’m doing in this track). And I’m not sorry it took six or seven months to work that out, or that I’ve strayed away from the original idea. How can one possibly know what something is going to be until ones does it over and over again.
3’57 Untitled #27C. A sheet of spangled tulle is cast high above the mix. The hail becomes rain and a twinkling motif slowly emerges from within the haze. Dusty breakbeats sweep down the frequency spectrum, loops and one-shots fire beyond the murk, 160 then 80. 160 again.
7’16 Kettle button click, kettle boiling boiling boiling. Sheets of rain drenching the sound bed.
09’10 I leave the proper stereo sound recorder with its new wind muffler in a hollow in the rubble of the ghost barn and walk away. After a few months of only catching scrappy phone recordings of the loverly linnets, I finally get a good long one. The flock is hanging about in the copse that’s grown up over the years around the remains of the building. I’m aware that if I leave they will relax a bit and I won’t only be recording their alarm calls. I go on a ten-minute walk.
09’26 I’m writing a short email to the farmer to thank him for the corners planted with white mustard and left over winter; to share with him how much joy the linnets have brought to the fields, and how I’d not noticed them congregating here in years past. An unconditional thank you. Gulp gerp gulp, tippety-tap. I think it was good that I wrote down that I might do this in a previous month’s liner notes because it really did make me actually take five minutes to make it happen. I don’t know if it was ever read but I hope so. I hope I wrote to the right farm.
10’05 I started a list “Things You Can Do In The Time it Takes To Dub 15 One-Hour Tapes” but in the end all I had on it was the word ‘Wisting’. Yes, I watched all three seasons. No, not all while I was dubbing 15 one-hour cassettes.
I don’t really know if I’d recommend it exactly but it was clearly diverting enough. WISTING SEASON 1 SPOILER ALERT: The main thought that took up too much rent-free space inside my head was that halfway through the first season the protagonist’s daughter was knocked unconscious, kidnapped and put in the boot of a car, miraculously and with much tenacity escaped her bonds and the boot, ended up clinging to the outside of the roof of a deserted hay barn at night that was also on fire with a literal serial killer pursuing her and lashing his axe at her through the rafters and then she fell off into deep snow just as a helicopter arrived with lights blazing and deafening rotors and once this considerable and lifechanging ordeal is over … it is quite simply never mentioned ever again.
10’47 Are you familiar with what North Americans call dumpster-diving? Well, I’m calling this desk-diving. Going through discarded recordings saved on the mixing desk under weird strings of characters and digits, looking for something to eat. A small girl declares: “Number 3 is coming up! After this musical interlude …”.
Some kind of Augustus Pablo-inspired dub-delayed melodica, layers of little voices, taps and bloinks on everything from a tongue drum to some bongos. How great it is to record the kids and their friends, at an age when they’re self-assured and unashamed. And to re-discover those recordings years later. How great it is to furnish the kids and their friends with a microphone, a vocoder and an effects pedal at any age and see what they can do. This I would recommend.
11’26 The old car is wheezing again. An air pipe has split on its way to the turbo. Here is the sound of its tractor-like engine, bound to Earth while a bi-plane drones through the Heavens.
12’04 Jam on toast.
12’10 Untitled #29B. A very wonky (and I think all-the-more interesting for it) reprise of a sequence that made its way both into last month’s mixtape and onto the video internets. But now loads of fun modulation is being fired into the patch points of the Mimeophon delay module and the sequencer clock. By the end it’s moving so fast it’s an absolute blurr-rrrr-rrr.
15’55 The ticking of the kitchen chronometer, creaky floors, steps to the fridge. Rosie has decided its lunchtime so I have been able to procure for you, dear listener, her best and most dedicated meows.
16’26 Like most hungry readers, I love collecting up snippets of text that catch my eye. Scraps of cloth kept back with half an idea; one day I might have wisdom enough to stitch them together and make my own cloak. Returning to the notes I made while reading Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time earlier this month, a ‘humming, glowing tapestry’ of observations about the making of her garden juxtaposed with unflinching historical context, I found that I’d only jotted down plant names. And that I’d enjoyed it just as much. “Achillea ‘Pink Grapefruit’, lots of silvery artemisia, bloody cranesbill ‘Cedric Morris.’” Instead of the usual disconnected threads, Laing has inspired me to start a garden diary.
My first entry:
“w/e of 1-2 March 2025 – frosty mornings gave way to stunning bright days with real warmth in the sun. Cut brambles to the ground, took scrap wood to the tip, chainsaw arrived (very neat, battery-powered). Dave cut bits of hedges inc. the greengage … now all the brash is lined up by the old caravan pointing in the same direction like a giant broomstick – the van will fly away on it! Planted out geranium psilostemon x 5. Gift from C, and the 2 x perovskia I bought at the end of last summer from a deserted roadside stall when the garden was looking very sad and flat. Moved some heuchera around to better places and uprooted lamb’s ear and yarrow that was crowding them out, inc. one growing right on top of a red-leaved persicaria (a sort of ornamental knotweed that I got from Gran’s garden sometime after she died, used to be in the front garden but it got too shady – now split in two and doing well) …”
Everything is still in the ground yet there is suddenly the promise of potential. What happened next is that I recorded the track you’re now listening to. I think it will be called The Garden of Impending Bloom.
21’51 We circle back to the DVLA hold music and the rain. Electromagnetic disturbances from my mobile phone are broadcast into the room. A warm and non-robotic female Welsh voice: “Good morning, my name is Rhian, how can I help––”
Untitled #27D. A motif returns from last month and from earlier in this tape. But this sound has been allowed to complete its life. Delay-drenched, hanging in that same diaphonous atmosphere. A contrast of weights. Now you get to see what happened.
26’12 End
Loula Yorke 