audio description for the August mixtape

25th July 2024

Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics

Olympus LS-100 sound recorder, iPhone, modular synth, DAW

00’00 Wife Imitates Art are getting married. One of the brides arrives by sea, floating across the bay on an inflatable swan. The assembled company is gathered at what remains of the pier to greet her. By Monday, the scene is being reported at the school gates 17 miles away. “That must have been what my sister saw!”

This is how legends are made.

00’14 I walk away from the throng for a moment. Down the steps to the beach to catch the sounds of the waves lapping across the pebbles on the shoreline.

01’30 To Love And Friendship And Crossing Long Distances

Cheers of joy, laughter, the rattle of a tambourine, the kiss on the pier, the sounds of the tides, the sounds of the brides. Wedding singers cover Lykke Li, old friends tell each other even older jokes; memories of dads no longer with us. These are woven into the ebb and flow of the music. Coming together again after so long apart. The wedding toast is ‘To love and friendship and crossing long distances’. We are in awe; how can this day stretch big enough to contain all our love!? Yet it does. Oh, it does!

I cry at everything, as you must know by now.

the shoreline on the beach at Plymouth Ho. You can see clumps of seaweed and pebbles.

A close-up of the shoreline. You can see clumps of bubbles moving and fizzing through the seawater.

08’40 Acrylic nails on a train table, skittering, processed. A voice
stuttering. We skim past ranks of boats moored up along an estuary, this
river flows towards another coast. The sounds of another tide, another
time. The phone held low in the chamber beneath the groynes, boom and
rumble.

11’10 A beach of little stones from my album speak, thou vast and venerable head which came out this month.

Where I live, shingle and dune meet the sea directly: no cliffs, no drama, no grand views. A place for the lover of loneliness. The sound of the waves rushing over the stones has been created using foley effects. Gravel in a large metallic bowl half-filled with water, processed and arranged in the DAW.

The synth part is voiced by the Instruo Cš-L oscillator. One envelope, one VCA and a random clock moving a simple looping melody along its pathway. The stripped-back simplicity speaks to the bleak topography of our stretch of coastline. How the sea itself reflects the evening sky; an illusory mirror of silver-pink disappears into the horizon.

13’00 Being mixed in here is the processed voice of Una Lee. She reads from Christian Bérard by Gertrude Stein, though you can’t quite tell that yet.

15’00 The words in stops and starts.

“Where eating is her subject. Withdraw whether it is eating which is her subject. Literally. While she ate eating is her subject. Afterwards too and in between. This is an introduction to what she ate. She ate a pigeon and a soufflé. That was on one day. She ate a thin ham and its sauce. That was on another day. She ate desserts. That had been on one day. She had fish grouse and little cakes that was before that day. She had breaded veal and grapes that was on that day. After that she ate every day. Very little but very good.”

16’20 Untitled #15.

Rehearsal footage recorded ahead of my performance on 19th July at The Cut, Halesworth.

I arrange for the stage to be covered in buckets of cut flowers. I luxuriate in them.

After the show there are five vases in my bedroom alone; dark red velvet snapdragons nestle in with giant heads of mallow; tubes of nicotina the colour of fresh limes, statuesque stems of dill and fennel. Cornflowers of the brightest blue, frothy white umbels of feverfew. Corn cockles, crocosmia, marguerites.

22’06 Dusk in Walberswick. A colony of swifts is doing tricks. Swooping, screaming, shrill in the sky above.

24’45 Someone told us about a lady in the village who greets the annual return of the swifts, “welcome home my darlings!” Dave whispers, “the crows are my darlings”.

24’51 The Scream x Here come the drums. I set up a feedback loop with a microphone, envelope follower, drum synth, dub delay and a control voltage looper. Una Lee uses her voice to interact with it. She and I had a Zoom call this month.

26’35 To Love And Friendship And Crossing Long Distances (Part 2)

I add euphoria, triumph. Throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care. I make synthetic triplets of shrieks and yelps. I make the feeling of letting go. Allow your eyes to blur, your smile to streak weirdly across your face. I make reeling. I make dancing.

32’40 The sea, the sea

After a month of phone recordings and voice notes, I took the proper sound recorder down to the Suffolk coast last night. I went alone. I wanted to catch some deep listening magic.

I wanted to unwind. Time, like the sea, unties all knots.

A view of some sand dunes with a wide sky. There is a path to the sea and the beach, which lies beyond the dunes out of sight.

A top-down close-up of sea spray hitting some shingle on a beach.

You are now listening to a blissful seven minutes of tide. Of roar, of slap, of spray, of crash. Waves washing and fizzing through the shingle. It’s just us and the sea. The wide open sea.

“And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among these billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out.”

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

40’00 My footsteps on the shingle, walking you ashore.

40’08 End