25th June 2024
Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics
Olympus LS-100 sound recorder, iPhone, modular synth, DAW.
00’00 Early on in the month DJ Warlock posted a video on Instagram of him mixing a couple of golden-era dubstep tunes. Those ghostly FM waves were the impetus I needed to make the track coming in now, Untitled #10.
04’36 You can hear me really ramping up the modulation.
It wasn’t until January this year that bought my first complex oscillator, a thirdhand Instruo Cš-L. Up until now I’ve felt a bit nervous about digging deep into its functions; uncomfortable with the idea of encountering an unpredictable discordancy that has the power to wreck a live take. This week I’ve played around with it enough to feel I might be able to nail it.
06’40 I am standing completely still on what we call ‘the green’. It’s around 8pm in early June. The green is another feature of the landscape left over from an old way of life. It’s in fact made up of lots of small parcels of land, verges and fields, each with their own character and soil type. The green stretches across two villages, sections around dotted here and there. What unites these disparate sites is that they’re all still cut for hay in late June – a practice that went out of fashion with using a horse to pull your plough. Until recently, the parish council kept back the largest most central bloc, mowing it intensively during spring and summer: the logic being that the grass needed to be kept short for village gatherings. The last time I remember seeing this bit of the green in use by anyone except dog-walkers was for a fete organised to celebrate the queen’s 60th Jubilee. Long story short, last year there was a welcome change of heart. This wildflower meadow is being allowed to grow.
7’26 My hay fever is at its peak. I start to walk in thigh-high grass, through foxtails and fescues dotted with buttercups. Sorrel so scarlet it almost glows magenta in the setting sun. In a damp corner I come across tussocks of sedge and a patch of cuckoo flower, delicate white petals tinged with the palest lilac.
08’53 I have to stop!! Omgggg!!! I notice a barn owl hunting over the green. I turn my body around really slowly to follow it, I’m witnessing a functioning food chain in action, baby! Long grass means spiders, spiders mean voles, voles mean barn owls. Majestic, silent, I’m a totally awestruck. A plane flies slowly overhead.
9.26 A car passes.
9’40 And another. I take this as my cue to leave: the moment has been broken, the owl is out of view.
10’03 My hayfever is really bad now. Unable to use my nose for breathing at all by this point. Brain feels like a void stuffed with straw and wet rags.
10’23 I feel something extra tickly on my wrist. I glance down. Two massive leggy insects appear to be fucking on it. You can hear my short, sharp exhalation blows them aside.
10’40 A car passes right beside me. I step onto the road. Footsteps on dry tarmac and gravel.
10’54 Untitled #11 Stretch fades in.
10’55 Fine plumes of ladies bedstraw, light as air, are growing next to a patch of boggy green on the other side of the road. I go over and stick my feet in the marsh for your listening pleasure. I now have wet boots on top of everything going on in the breathing department.
I decide to stop recording and head over to a network of fields to the north-west of the green. A place I can’t remember visiting since last year.
The eerie elongated time-stretched span of Untitled #11 Stretch continues underneath.
11’30 I am greeted by the glorious sight of land in the midst of a recuperative process: untamed, inhospitable to humans. Fallow fields are given a final plough before being left empty, meaning the ground is made up of deeply uneven welts of hard earth. I don’t know what I’m about to put my foot into, whether it will hold or yield. No two steps are the same. The undergrowth is thick enough to obscure the terrain; ankles, knees, anything can go. I can’t find a footpath and I really want to explore: the plants are really different from the things that grow reliably on the green year in, year out, so I go for it: straight through the middle. I’m looking for a spot to leave the recorder so I can go off wandering – wading through waist-height grasses that shed stiff, needle-like awns into the linings of my boots. Brushing past sow thistles, spear thistles and prickly ox-tongue that pierce through my trousers. I leave the recorder on the ground and crunch away.
You’re listening to the sounds of the field and a distant hedgerow. Over the next few minutes you’ll hear a blackbird or two and a robin, jackdaws and pigeons, a wren, a blackcap and a chaffinch. The wings of bugs and insects of all denominations tickle and buzz up against the sound recorder. Planes drone by overhead.
13’56 Untitled #11 fades in
14’34 I surprise a pheasant.
Tiny heads of scarlet pimpernel grow through a crunchy mat of last year’s black meddick. Delicate tentacles creep around flowering chamomile and the occasional red poppy.
I pass clumps of ragweed, red-veined docks and willowherb. Slender sprays of meadow foxtail and canary grass cosy-up to stinging nettles. Staggering stems of goose grass that stick to my clothes.
In the world of the invertebrates, there are some fawn-coloured female common blue butterflies. A flash of turquoise blue-banded demoiselles, darting in and out of spikes of yellow agrimony.
17’22 A gunshot rings out in the distance, you’ll hear a few coming up. I never find it comfortable.
18’47 A motorbike engine, more shots fired.
19’30 You can hear chiffchaffs in the hedge in the distance; tiny warblers visiting us for the summer. I read somewhere about the ornithologists at the Environmental Education Project in Beit Jala who catch and ring migrating chiffchaffs, releasing them to continue their way northwards through the region. I wonder if any of these little olive-brown birds made the journey through Palestine this April.
I’m back thinking about cycles again; about how “the world keeps ending and yet the world goes on”, to quote the poet, Franny Choi:
… By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled …
[and breathe]
20’45 I surprise another pheasant.
I’ve reached a part of the field populated by giants. White campion flowers bob along at eye-level; hoary plantains on steroids; towering dark-ribbed cow parsnips and angelicas, peppered through with spear thistles, piercing limbs striking out in every direction. Bees cluster on damson-coloured lips of hedge woundwort.
I see a tall slim lone purplish figure I don’t recognise. My plant ID app tells me it’s water figwort, as well as revealing the identities of all the grasses I’m currently having a severe allergic reaction to. Fabulous names like rough bluegrass, Yorkshire fog, rat’s tail fescue and slender wild oats.
22’50 The familiar call of a common wood-pigeon, five coos to the collared-dove’s three.
23’21 Untitled #12 starts to slowly fade in. I’m all about the dry, tickly drums this month.
23’42 I walk back to the recorder and power it off. Back on the road, I sit on the verge, hoicking off boots and socks: emptying out seeds, thorns, awns, burrs, baby slugs, and tiny spiders; running my hands over everywhere looking for ticks. I streak home to the warm embrace of a packet of antihistamines.
26’26 Rosie Fur purring. She wants me to feed her (again). Cats vibrate at a low, soothing 25 to 150 Hz. It’s easy to feel they might have the power to heal.
27’46 I am typing an email. Making arrangements to fix my recording desk. The main mix slider got really bent while packing down after a live gig last year; now it randomly fires really loud signal through the right speaker. The other night when I recorded a live video clip for Xitter I was left with a ringing ear. I scared myself enough to get it serviced.
29’00 Rosie’s purrs have overpowered me. We walk down the wooden stairs together to get to the kitchen. The floorboards creak underfoot. A drone made of complex harmonics, FM sounds, and filter sweeps plays underneath.
29’50 All Rosie’s dreams come true.
30’32 And now biscuits as well! Followed by the sounds of the first cup of tea of the day being made.
31’03 I am really pushing the FM Index to get that deep growl on the drone.
32’28 Creaking floorboards as I walk back and forth.
32’49 Untitled #13. Playing with the delay times by hand on these single notes. A single looping sequence of notes being sounded by different oscillators with different envelopes, timings and octave shifts.
34’00 The water goes into the cup, as does some milk.
34’21 I rinse out an empty glass milk bottle and place it on the counter beside the sink.
36’45 A week or two after my foray into the fallow field, I return and venture much further, finding more of them. These ones are filled with the sounds of skylarks singing “shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d”. Great lengths of electrical cable are strung across pylons that march into the horizon.
It’s been intensely wet but now it’s intensely hot. I can hear the power lines crackling, fields of electricity ionising the humid air around the conductors, and I’m trying to record some of it.
38’20 The atmosphere is buzzing, prickly and arid. I am walking through thistles and dry grasses. I can hear the fizzle coming off the pylons in real life but it doesn’t seem to be on the recording, so later I make my own.
38’28 Did I tell you I have some casual work in a second hand record shop now? I spend occasional days cataloguing vinyl of all ages, conditions and genres into a spreadsheet. I get to listen to anything I like the look of while I’m doing it. The needle drops onto Protection by Massive Attack; you are listening to its crackle and hiss.
39’01 I am still walking in the tinderbox field, underscored by warm noise sourced from the end of Cat Stevens’ 1971 album Teaser and the Firecat. I record the left and right speaker noise separately onto my phone and re-create the stereo image later in the DAW.
39’21 You are listening to the hissing silence at the close of The Greatest Hits by The Temptations, pressed in 1966. I’ve layered up the recording and added some moving EQ effects using ShaperBox.
All these deliciously dry sounds occupy the sonic space where the power lines would have been.
39’46 Untitled #14 fades up. A live improv, with notes provided by a quantised analogue shift register, voiced by sine and saw waves, underscored by a harmonic drone. Everything is fed into a granular processor, then through a delay module stacked up with control voltage modulation – holding, flipping, chopping and freezing in time. I added a further layer of Valhalla delay later in the DAW.
43’17 A blustery evening recording out of my bedroom window. I am in bed watching the new season of Bridgerton.
45’05 You can hear rain starting to fall, some hammering from a neighbour’s DIY.
48’30 The evening chorus – song thrush and blackbird, sparrows, doves and pigeons – continues.
50’52 I am speeding everything up in the improv piece to create some kind of crescendo. I don’t think I know quite how to finish this thing.
52’50 Wind in wet trees. Cars on a wet road.
53’30 A short burst of ethereal sound brings this month’s mixtape to a close.
53’53 Finally, you are left with only the sound of Rosie Fur, gently snoring.
55’38 End.
Stray Links
DJ Warlock’s dubstep mix instagram clip
PictureThis app I’m not particularly endorsing this app. I’m sure there are other apps. I obviously don’t know if/when i’m getting false results, but what it throws up seems to usually look right. As a rule of thumb, don’t use phone apps to identify edibles.
Franny Choi’s poem The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On
I will deadname this website until my last breath – Imani Gandy
Loula Yorke 