audio description for the december mixtape

28th November 2024

Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics

00’00 Walking in a coastal wood on a brisk, grey, late autumn day. A plane drones overhead. I am impatient, always wanting to get on.

Considering everything we know and everything we feel, it’s no surprise we all want to keep moving. It certainly helps takes the edge off. But there exists an alternative: stay right where I am and pay close attention. So I do that instead.

I was today years old when I realised you can actually hear leaves fall. Crisp and slight as they pat onto the ground below. I started recording because I heard a woodpecker, perhaps I’ll hear it again? Birdsong in all dimensions, from all directions – bluetits, marsh tits, long-tailed tits, robin, wren and goldcrest to name a few.

Philosopher of affect, Brian Massumi, would approve of me staying still, here, like this. “Be right where you are—more intensely”. He might say that’s the closest thing we might have to a feeling of hope, when everything around us has fallen down.

“Hope can be made useful when it is not connected to an expected success”, when it’s “separated from a rational calculation of outcomes”. I really dig that framing.

03’26 Untitled #21. There are mice in the walls. I believe this is what they sound like, scrattling about, squeaking at each other, eating the insulation.

04’11 The clamour of a flock of house sparrows flying back and forth between the bird feeder and the hedge in the back garden.

A year or two ago I heard a segment on the radio about the disappeared sparrows of London. What stuck with me was the ornithologist explaining their social nature: a busy, clattering life of friends and families living in large colonies, but that, when times are hard, and a colony drops below a certain number of birds, it self-destructs. I felt it was implied they make a collective decision to call it quits, to stop breeding, to vanish. Months later I tried to find the programme to work out if I’d understood her correctly, but it too had vanished. So I’m sharing the story as an impression that was made upon me, that’s all.

Untitled #21continues. Shimmering drones and twisting delays wrap themselves around some repeating cycles of notes, causing fracture and disintegration. A restlessness like the wind.

15’00 The leaves are still falling and small birds are still singing in the woods.

16’21 Untitled 19B. A relative of the first piece in last month’s mixtape. This time the tiny glass marbles of sound glance off the surface of a hefty drone. The calls of a rook. The slap and patter of leaf litter whorling through the branches, through the air, down to earth. Next year’s mulch in a chill breeze.

25’25 They refurbished the public restrooms at Liverpool Street Station and now the din of a distant rainforest is projected from speakers concealed in the ceiling. The bleep of auomated tills. Select payment type. Use pinpad to complete transaction. A low-pass filter pings, bouncing and fizzing against a tight and rapid envelope, repeated through a cascade of delay. Sounding for the world like opening a can of soda. Like ice in a glass.

A horse trots along the tarmac. The same beast ran amok last week, galloping without its rider the whole length of the road. People came out to look. Things are rarely allowed to be so out of control in the countryside. It was kind of liberating to witness.

Warrenton Page, chronicler of a Suffolk village fifteen miles south of here, details a disappeared soundscape between the years 1900 and 1983. He notes the put-putting of the gas engine at the mill, the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer, the hooter at the waterside works, the roar of trains, volleys of bells and whistles, clattering hooves on the picked stone road, the voices of farm labourers guiding horses in the field, “Cupee-wee” to the left, “Grr Wherr-ee” to the right.

“One pensioner, Abraham Stiff, who was bedridden, would guess, mostly correctly, who was passing by his house, by the particular ‘step’.”

We’re losing sounds, perhaps, and the ability to distinguish them. A horse’s hooves must sound different against tarmac than on a picked stone road.

26’23 At the Hayward to see Haegue Yang’s retrospective. One air diffuser dispenses the scent of black tea, all dry and smoky; another the scent of canned peaches. The gallery is hung with reams of powder-coated venetian blinds strung at right-angles, dim lights cast shadows through the shuttered angles.

From the voiceover of a film I make out a woman’s voice saying something like “When one makes the foreign land a homeland. When one makes oneself an outsider, an insider. When one simply lets one’s …”

Everything is still fizzing and bouncing in the ears.

26’44 At Boundaries Festival, Mohammad Syfkhan’s bouzouki strikes up a tune and then disintegrates into a meeting of friends under the departures board. Hello lady, hello my love, hello darling. A flock of geese honk as they fly through the air. I am still walking in the woods.

A snippet of Rosie’s purr. She does the same thing most days, and really who can blame her? The business of being alive is nothing if not repetitious. I decide a big part of the monthly mixtape project is making a note of commonplace stuff. Being present, resisting the urge to rush on, to take it all for granted. I consider how easy it is for sounds and actions to get lost. I consider how often what we think we are seeking is found right back where we started; that we had it all along.

Wading through humus: crunch, rustle and snap. Fungus pushing up through the deep lush floor.

28’13 Untitled #22. Pale and gentle synthesised tones fade in. Long and short, in reverse, in repeat. Always with a drone, the hum of the Earth, holding us all together.

32’16 I borrowed a Moog key synth from Dave. I’ve become so used to banging my head against the wall of having no touch interface, having to program everything in, having to patch all my envelopes and filters and effects to get any sounds out, and and and … that I’ve utterly forgetten how easily things flow when you’re playing a fixed architecture synth with a keyboard. The knobs are already hardwired to make the best sounds! There are presets to get you started! Like a little taste of honey.

This isn’t a precursor to an announcement that I’m ‘getting out of eurorack’ (as they say, dramatically, on the gear-selling forums). More a joyful reminder that there is a world outside of my constraints, and I’m allowed to dwell in it whenever I like.

33’08 Still in the woods, the cable of the headphones glances off the body of the sound recorder making a little volley of sumptuous ‘toc-toc-tocs’.

33’11 Where are we, Toytown? The set of Wreck-It Ralph? An arcade game being shaken upside down until all the coins and sweets and gaudy plastic insanity has fallen right out and is strewn all over the floor, and folk are just tripping over it and rollerskating all around in it now?

33’49 Synthesised percussive stabs and squeezes punctuate the sounds of the woods. Heavy farm machinery whines away in the far distance.

34’30 Two sets of feet descend a winding wooden staircase, out of sync, no sense of meter. A synth line asks a question and receives a reply.

35’20 Untitled #23.I found this recording saved on the desk, I think it must be the audio from the exact same sesssion I did to make this video clip, but longer. Folks were really keen on that, so here it is. I wish I’d recorded a proper full-length version then and there, but that’s what I’ll be doing this month and next. No gigs! Only writing and recording, and getting my mixing desk fixed (again) and banging my head against the wall – all for a cornucopia of exciting full-length releases coming next year!

38’10 Untitled #24. Oh the keys! The keys! A free and joyous improv with some lovely deep bass in resolution to see us out. ‘Til we meet again next year 🕯️🕊️✨

41’07 End.