Winter Soup sound

Winter Soup was made to accompany two-projector 16mm film work Autumn Fog by Lynn Loo, performed at Unconscious Archive 4 at Apiary Studios, Hackney, London yesterday evening. This particular performance was actually recorded today as the live performance was not recorded.

I first performed an accompaniment for Autumn Fog last year at Seeing in the Dark in Newcastle. In Autumn Fog Lynn explores the colours of leaves in her back garden, superimposing positive and negative 16mm film in live projection. For the performances I recorded sounds in my own backyard and read a text relating observations of events in the backyard and its proximity. The text was layered live using a looping record unit. For each performance I made a new recording and text in order to make the work as temporally close as possible to the everyday specificity at the time of the performance.

Winter Soup text

it's winter

low sun

it's cold in the backyard
trains passing
the weekend's snow
turning to slush
almost disappearing
the autumn leaves
shrivelled on the ground

brown
dried

a cat came over the fence
across the railway tracks
down the bank
is this the same cat I saw in the allotment

through the long grass

a couple of days ago
and other wildlife
the foxes
the magpies in the trees
and those birds that sing at night

do the foxes get into the backyard
I've yet to see one

********

the train
the East London line
one way to Dalston Junction

the main line
to London Bridge

and the other
New Cross Station
the trains slow
as they pull in to New Cross station

the faster
on the far side track

and then the lines
to London Bridge
from Kent
and beyond

********

I'm making a soup
from the left over vegetables
frying up some onions
some garlic
tomatoes

some slushy snow on top of the ivy on the fence

slices of time here
the soup of the weekend weather
layers of recordings
observations
ingredients thrown into the soup
layers of time

different meals
cooked at different times
slices of onion
recombined
slices of parsnip
in a soup
soup is a mashup
a few day's meals
a few day's culinary observations
literally mashed up
all cooked in the same place
the whole becomes
a mixture of slices through time

********

the sound of frying

the fog of the weekend's cooking
Saturday's curry
Friday's vegetables
slicing metaphors
in goes the garlic
some water

********

I thought I would become a train
or a cat
or a fox

let it simmer

the cat as it comes across the tracks
down the bank
into the backyard

the fox as it snuffles around
scavenging
scraps of food

********

the train
as it enters the station
on the last leg
from Canada water
through Surrey Quays
into New Cross
where it rests
for ten minutes
or so

it returns
refreshed
back on its journey to
Dalston Junction
relieved of pressure
and friction
that caused the wheels to spark
on the icy rails
on Saturday night
illuminating the entire room
illuminating the backyard
bright
split second
flashes

********

parsnip
sweet potato

********

for Autumn Fog, with Lynn Loo,

at Unconscious Archives #4, Apiary Studios

7 February 2012

live at Seeing in the Dark

live at Seeing in the Dark by Steven Ball

Soundtracks performed to Vowels & Consonants by Lynn Loo & Guy Sherwin and Autumn Fog by Lynn Loo, recorded live at Seeing in the Dark, CIRCA, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 19 October 2011.

The Vowels & Consonants soundtrack replays and manipulates samples of Bob Cobbing reading with additional live utterances. Autumn Fog is based on a recording of my back yard (the leaves in the film were shot in Lynn's backyard), with spoken quotidian observation.

"...Vowels and Consonants consists of six projected loops in which individual letters appear intermittently crawling up and across the surface of the screen, occasionally intruding into the optical sound area, thus emitting gentle plops of sound which seem to emulate the sound of the letters. As in other optical sound works the relationship between image and sound is integral: while the use of letters suggests a literal ‘reading’ it also resembles ‘concrete’ text such as Bob Cobbing used with Koncrete Kanticle, used as much to prompt vocal sounds in performance as to be read as conventional poetic text. As such the work becomes, like concrete or performance poetry, a score for itself. In fact, Loo and Sherwin have regularly extended the work with the addition of live sound and musical accompaniment, often local to the place of performance and, in this context, the projectors become instruments, part of an ensemble. "
Steven Ball, 'Conditions of Music: Contemporary Audio-Visual Spatial Performance Practice', Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (Tate Publications, 2011)