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Deep dreaming landscapes abstracted through song vectors. Animal, vegetable, and mineral. Above, on, and below the ground. In the past, present, and future. All at once in and out of place.
When Andy Wood from TQ zine tweeted a call asking whether anyone would be interested in releasing a CD/download on TQN-aut, I responded almost immediately. I had been an avid reader of the zine from the first issue, and had recorded a track for the Tone Quanta compilation album, so the idea was instantly appealing. At that time I was about to continue work on the larger project of which Bastard Island is the first manifestation, but this would entail embarking on a fairly lengthy reading, writing, recording process. As I knew that this was going to take a long time to come to any kind of fruition, I decided to postpone and work on something that could be quickly realised for TQN-aut and began to try out a few ideas.
I started by constructing fairly rhythmic sequences in Ableton Live, with which I would then improvise along to with guitar and voice, record live to hard drive, build further layers of voice, guitar and drone tracks, until things started to take some kind of shape. Many of these tracks wouldn’t make it to the final mix, which means that there are orphaned vocal melodies, improvised lyrics, and guitar lines buried somewhere on the hard drive, and while they have been rejected, they still played a crucial role in forming the shape of the songs.
When it came to the point of working on lyrics, I returned to some notes I’d been making around imaginative figurations of landscape, following a trip that I had made to Australia earlier in the year. These responded to time spent in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, and my encounters with what is, in spite of the injustices of colonialism that both haunt the place historically and continue to be enacted, a profoundly present indigenous culture. More than many other places in Australia this place is managed partly in accordance with the traditional owners’ practices, and the presence of Aboriginal culture, both in contemporary forms and dating back hundreds of thousands of years, the latter particularly in the form of rock art, is everywhere evident; here the local Aboriginal communities maintain a strong connection to their country. So I was interested to try to evoke and meditate around some of the philosophical principles of that, influenced by and working through conceptual notions of the human as being as much an integral part of the landscape, part of the place, as any other flora or fauna, coming out of it, going back into it, in particular with the songs Grounded and Abstracted Vectoral Landscape. This was also worked through in the cover image, which came out of experimenting with applying ‘deep dream’ image processing to photographs taken in Kakadu, which seemed to me to suggest that every form in the landscape becomes mutable, animal forms emerge from flora, vegetation acquires animal or mineral properties, and so on. It is as though the entire landscape is under the influence of a powerful hallucinogenic which utterly reconfigures it as an assemblage, not simply as an image of a place, but also in how every part of that place might see every part of itself, become a vector for itself. Perhaps as a result the song recordings start to get a little psychedelic, maybe also reflecting the spatio-temporal dislocation of jet lag.
Sickness Country takes a more measured minimal musical approach, consisting entirely of guitar loops and voice. The title is the term used by the indigenous locals for the land that was mined for uranium, it is not only the effect of uranium poisoning on the human population that is described, it is also that the very country itself suffers illness. A great injustice is being done to country that is mined for such a toxic substance for profit.
The album starts on a long-haul airplane flight as Suspension speculates about where one might be in temporal and spatial relationship with the ground, while Polylingual is something of an Arthur Russell inspired jam with layered voices formed from pre-lingual utterances.
The album was made over two months, June and July 2019, from the first recording to the final mastering.
3pm Sunday 10 February 2019
Linear Obsessional Live
The ArtsCafe
Manor Park
Hither Green
London SE13 5QZ
(directions here)
admission £5 donation
Songs from Bastard Island will be played.
Also performing will be:
Found Drowned (James O'Sullivan, Peter Marsh and Paul May)
Liz Helman
Paul Khimasia Morgan and Daniel Spicer
Portia Winters
Bastard Island
Steven Ball
CD and download long player album
Linear Obsessional 2019 LOR120
available at:
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/bastard-island
the weather is routinely
unseasonable
no reliable reports
unpredictable
set up the microphone
time enough to prepare...
Bastard Island arrives as a collection of speculative fiction dispatches from spatio-temporally ambiguous elsewheres and elsewhens. These descriptive songs are fragmented and episodic crypto-narrative participant observations. They evoke disrupted temporal, meteorological, geographical, and seasonal conditions, and local and global social inertia. The songs inhabit ambient soundbeds redolent with spatial diffraction, signal refraction, small sounds, and distance communication.
A picnoleptic production in the English Asteroid series, written and recorded by Steven Ball, Summer 2018.
Linear Obsessional 2019 LOR120
CD and download long player album available from:
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/bastard-island
Life of Barrymore receives a thoughtful review from Ed Pinsent in The Sound Projector blog here
In the review he writes:
Steven Ball may be asking pointed questions about celebrity and the
media, or implying some critique in amongst all this, though I’m not
sure if that is the point of the work. Personally I find celebrity
culture banal, and shows like those of Jeremy Kyle and Matthew Wright to
be extremely destructive and damaging to the national psyche. But I am
being judgemental.
The question of the 'critique', intended or otherwise, that the work may or may not make, is a question that has exercised me in relation to this and other projects which have appropriated forms of articulated text as re-articulation. It is a question which I have attempted to address in various ways elsewhere, but prompted by Ed's speculation about the 'point' of the work, it is one that I hope to address soon, here.
I recently re-discovered and have been re-listening to these three CDs over the past couple of days. Hope (1998), Trace (1999) and Zero (2000) were limited edition collections of one-minute, or two-minute in the case of the double CD Trace, soundworks. Contributors were invited to create an original recording of specified duration for each thematic CD. They were published by Audio Research Editions, which was founded by Colin Fallows in 1998 as a limited edition imprint for artists' soundworks.
The Audio Research Editions website tells us that:
“Audio Research Editions CDs contain soundworks by a broad range of international sound artists, experimental composers, noise makers and other audio creators. Using the limited edition print as a formal model, the imprint has to date published over two hundred works by artists from over twenty countries. Audio Research Editions treats the compact disc as an art space with each edition containing a themed audio exhibition that can be experienced in either linear or random modes.”
The CDs included contributions by ARPARP, Joe Banks, Warren Burt, Martin e Greil, The Groceries, Reed Ghazala, id battery, in between noise, The Land Of Nod, Longstone, The Mindwinder, Yoko Ono, Henry Priestman, Project Dark, Lee Ranaldo, Keith Rowe, scanner, Semiconductor, Will Sergeant, Janek Schaefer and Skyray among many others, including me.
The artists range from the well-known, the obscure and the unknown; the shortness, diversity and number of the tracks (68 on Hope, 70 on the two disc Trace, 46 on Zero) and their alphabetical-by-artist-name order, lends an arbitrary egalitarianism to the project which is further enhanced by taking the advice of the suggestion in the sleeve notes that they are ideally listened to in random mode: this is a project made for the shuffle play age. The CDs can be heard in their entirety as Real Media files (unfortunately only in unshuffleable linear order) at the Audio Research Editions website.
Here are my contributions to the three CDs:
Hope Under the Weather (1 minute, 1998, 1.5Mb, mp3) from the Hope CD, is a compacted remix of the soundtrack to my super 8 film Microphone (1994, 24 min). The film centred around the elliptical theme of a shadowy individual who lived in a small back room facing onto Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne recording the weather and making arcane calculations based on the International Dateline. This shadowy individual was of course me and I appear briefly in the film with a shaved head wearing a green dress and ruby lipstick.
Brittle Creek Stalker Track (2 minutes, 1999, 2.9Mb, mp3) from the Trace CD, original sleeve notes: “Original tapes recorded on the foot along Brittle Creek Track, digitally parsed as image files and traced back to sound through a variety of programmes. Retracing the steps and strangely resonant with the haunting presence that haunts the track.” The title is an allusion to Brittlesea which was an early name for Brightlingsea in Essex. The originating field recordings were made on a track alongside Brightlingsea Creek.
Say Zero (1 minute, 2000, 1.5Mb, mp3) from the Zero CD, original sleeve notes: “Digital dub stammers, loping fractures and repeated returns to a zero point – an end in itself. A micro mix of incomplete projected settings of ante-logocentric voice fragments. Constructed at the Footscray Dip House.” The voices were sourced from a promotional CD for a voice over agency, the voices were manipulated effectively by removing the diphthongs from the recorded spoken words.
