Alights on a Cloud

I was invited to make a soundtrack piece for the Super 8 film Alights on a Cloud by Lee Smith, a friend and well-respected filmmaker who died in Melbourne in 2008. This is the instrumental sound bed, consisting of three layered guitar improvisations recorded while watching the film. The final sound piece will also have a voice narration which consists of texts relating to the location of the film, its history, and Lee's interest in it. A number of other people have been invited to contribute sound and music to accompany Lee's films, the project has been instigated by Marcus Bergner.

When I moved to St. Leonards Ave., St.Kilda, I was fascinated by the timeless, placeless quality of the building next door - it could be anywhere in the world, and I wanted to capture the meditative quality of this realisation. So for three days and three nights I filmed through rain, sunshine and nightfall the ominous quality of a building that was home for a number of different people. 

The title comes from my interest in Native American spirituality which was very influential on me at the time. 'Alights on a cloud' is the name of a peaceful and tranquil person completely at one with his relationship to himself, the world around him, and the universe. 

- Lee Smith, Cantrills Filmnotes #87/88 December 1997

Speakers Sydney 2

higher resolution image to read score

iPhone panorama captured Thursday 19 November 2015, performance recorded Sunday 22 November 2015, presented at AAANZ conference Wednesday 25 November 2015.

Speakers Sydney 1

higher resolution image to read score

iPhone panorama captured Thursday 19 November 2015, performance recorded Sunday 22 November 2015, presented at AAANZ conference Wednesday 25 November 2015.

Artwash

This arrangement of Artwash was recorded before the version that appears on the Surplus EP. It was recorded before I had decided to eschew the use of conventional 'spatialising' echo and reverb effects, and to mix all the songs to mono. The version of the song on the EP was also played and sung live, direct to hard drive, without any effects. It's been something of a characteristic of my song writing and recording processes that they often begin with more complex instrumentation arrangements before arriving at more minimal finished versions. This isn't so much an 'essentialist' exercise, I'm not attempting to get to the 'essence' of a song, it's more that complexity is an early stage in the compositional process, and simplification is a development of that process.

Surplus

Life of Barrymore

I am pleased to announce that my new record LIFE OF BARRYMORE is available as a mini-CD and download from Linear Obsessional Recordings. Linear Obsessional supremo Richard Sanderson describes it on the Bandcamp page, and this is as good a description as it's likely to get, as:

Extraordinary EP of new songs by the New Cross based sound/visual artist and composer Steven Ball (a member of the influencial DIY electronics group Storm Bugs with Philip Sanderson). "Life of Barrymore" is a collection of songs with lyrics transcribed from verbatim recordings of specially selected snatches of British television. Haunting, and occasionally uncomfortable, "Life of Barrymore" treats these found texts with utmost seriousness, and are sung by Ball in a moving and mesmeric fashion over specially created beds of electro-acoustic construction. "Life of Barrymore" is a gripping and unique experience.

Listen and download from the player above, or at
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/life-of-barrymore
where you can also order the physical release which consists of a numbered, limited edition of 50 mini-CDRs. High-quality download in MP3, FLAC, and more, is available on Bandcamp and includes a full-colour PDF booklet with notes, lyrics and artwork.

Recorded 2014 - 15, Steven Ball sings, plays guitar, accordion, software instruments, Candy Crush (stuck on level 29), radiosonic and televisual ambience.

Linear Obsessional Recordings LR065
http://www.linearobsessional.org

"...as local as it gets..."

I'm very pleased to note two positive reviews of Collected Local Songs within a few days of each other.  The first by a singer/musician whose work I greatly admire (and one-time local), Sophie Cooper writing for Radio Free Midwitch 

"The songs are like perfect postcards picturing small details of everyday life seen through an appreciative eye."

and the second from local Deptford/New Cross blog Transpontine

"...an album that is as local as it gets..."

Thanks people!

genre vagrancy

from The Wire, April 2015
 
Steven Ball

Collected Local Songs

Bandcamp DL

Steven Ball is one half of Storm Bugs, a South East London duo who played a key role in the late 1970s/early 1980s cassette movement. Bending circuits, scratching vinyl, mutilating melody: they created a strangely liberated form of proto-industrial arte povera that, rediscovered and reissued over the last decade, has held up remarkably well. Loosely affiliated with that period’s DIY groups, Storm Bugs still feel uncaptured. Ball’s subsequent activities, moving across spoken word, video and installation, testify to his restless energy and genre vagrancy.

Collected Local Songs, while quieter in register, is equally intriguing. It's a drifting, sometimes aleatory assemblage of signs and signals encountered in South London's Deptford and New Cross. Ball sees the city as plunderphonic terrain, and this music is built up from layers of centifugal texts: ghost signs, ringtones, viral marketing skywriting, fragments of overheard speech. "Cloud Of Dreams" comes across like an old blues song written by conceptual architects Metahaven: "Woke up one morning/Singing phrases from a dream/Into his mobile phone".

There's drift and ambulation here. Memories, fragmented and not always lucid, act as bulwarks against capitalism's amnesia. The city is battered but not down for the count. It recalls the cussed melancholy of Jem Cohen’s films, or Stephen Dwoskin's Jesus Blood, the South London film best known for its Gavin Bryars score. Sometimes Ball’s vocals are a touch too measured, making "Deptford Flea Market lnterlude" - comprised of found sounds such as junglist beats and street stall patter - all the more potent. Collected Local Songs may be a discographic side swerve for him, but it's a resonant and very effective one.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Collected Local Songs

thanks to dubdog 

Collected Local Songs

Collected Local Songs is a new digital album of a collection of songs of quotidian and local reflection, mostly constructed from everyday language, observations, overheard conversations, encounters, signs, community notices, announcements, phrases from historical texts about Victorian social life; from around and about the neighbourhoods of Deptford and New Cross in South London; using simple compositional structures, recorded with minimal instrumental setting.  A prelude to this has been the 23 minute long song Signs and Wonders, which I released as a single song digital EP in September 2014, and the Cloud of Dreams single released in January.  The former forms part of Collected Local Songs, while where the Cloud of Dreams single release breaks the song into its two constituent vocal and instrumental parts as separate tracks, it appears on the album in complete form.

The album is a selection from songs I’ve written over the past twelve or so months. In July last year I presented some other song recordings at a Domino Nights event at Banner Repeater, and wrote that a “...concern has been about what a song might be, their ostensible ‘content’ in the lyrical textual source and form.” This has been in part prompted by the fact that I find even the most ‘experimental’, interesting, or innovative of contemporary singer/song writing, often slipping too easily into convention and romantic poetic and lyrical tropes in form and language. Whether I’m succeeding in making something more interesting than this is of course probably best assessed by others. 

The songs are informed or influenced as much by concerns beyond the usual conventions of songwriting, as they are by other songwriters. For example, there is the abiding influence of the Oulipo writers, in particular, Georges Perec, whose notions of the infra ordinary and project of exhausting a place, have been close to Collected Local Songs. Also the language and approach of a number of modernist and contemporary poets, from Francis Ponge and J. H. Prynne, among others, through to more recent forms of conceptual writing as promulgated by Marjorie Perloff in her book Unoriginal Genius, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, while wary of Goldsmith’s occasional totalizing anti-expression evangelizing.

The next set of songs to be released later this year will include those premiered in early versions at the Banner Repeater event; these do in some ways follow a more conceptual approach, being sourced from what might best be called ‘appropriated’ texts. And so to avoid the risk of over-analysing and giving too much away, I’ll leave it there...

Collected Local Songs is available to stream or purchase download from 2nd February 2015 at: https://stevenball.bandcamp.com/album/collected-local-songs

seasonal song 2

On the Wyrd, in which we plant the tree, drink mead and ale, and smear the hlaut... honour Odin, and Wudan the reborn great horned hunter, the goddess Berchta... belsnickel, banquet on herring and gruel, with kindred, hearth, our godhi and gydhja… we wear our valknuts hung low like a pendant, in the wheel of the year and the wyrd of community… 

Made for Xmas Messthetics from Radio FYTINI

seasonal song 1

 
I was almost too late with this. 

Last year Richard Sanderson invited people to make a two-minute piece for Button Box based on any element taken from his Air Buttons album, for which I recorded the song Polka Faith. 

This year Richard extended a similar invitation for a new compilation Two Minutes Left, with particular criteria:

My two rules were that the works had to be exactly two minutes long, and that at some point in the recording process a microphone should have been used - in other words, before the sounds presented here reach your ears they have, in some way, travelled through air. 

I made a new recording of a song from about twelve or so years ago which, titled Microphone, seemed a suitable choice. Originally written and recorded while I was jet-lagged, it has a vaguely melancholic lyric, which elaborates a pun on the words 'micro' and 'phone', and woozy melody.

I was almost too late with this, I recorded it the day before the deadline and submitted it just in time. Impressively Richard had 87 submissions, resulting in a substantial collection of two minutes, downloading now, and looking forward to hearing.

Two Minutes Left is available as a free download from Linear Obsessional Recordings on Bandcamp.

he's a Christian man because he's doing what he can, because he's doing what he can he's a Christian man...

I made this song last week following an open invitation by Richard Sanderson to create something responding to his album Air Buttons, which would then be collected into a complementary collection. I looped a section of one of his tracks, added some mouth percussion sounds, recorded myself singing a little lyric, and added a sample from Dear Black Eyes by Slim Doucet for good measure. The lyric was inspired by a conversation I had recently with an ordained Anglican minister, about his responsibility in an ostensibly secular community for helping people with matters of spirituality, whatever their own beliefs.

Richard has now compiled the responses, the astonishing number of 46 tracks, as the free download Button Box. 

Unspoken Word and Speakers

Following the release of the Storm Bugs back catalogue and new single on Bandcamp, I've uploaded the two mini-album collections of my sound works Unspoken Word and Speakers. As a sort of experiment in self-publishing it'll be interesting to see if anybody actually buys them, I'm not anticipating retiring on the proceeds!

Dodgy Provenance and the Fantastic Mundanity of Sound in Space

The final event in the Visual Thinking: Between Sound and Light workshop that I organised with Rob Mullender and Duncan White at Camden Arts Centre was presented on Saturday 16 February. For the workshops we had proposed that invited participants respond to the sounds of the Film in Space exhibition curated by Guy Sherwin.

We posed the question 

...taking the installed works' existence in the space and time of the exhibition as a given, what might become of sound as their residual and mutable extension?

The sound that we were inviting response to were those that Rob and I had recorded in the gallery space during the exhibition. Rob had concentrated on making close-up recordings of the machinery and sounds in the show, most often those of the 16mm projector parts, squeaky reels and so on, while my recordings were of the ambient sound of the rooms, ostensibly that of each piece, or at least in close proximity, using binaural microphones.  Of course the sound in the room at the point of viewing a specific piece didn't necessarily reflect the actual intended (or otherwise) sound of the work. Rather it was the sound of everything inside and outside the room relative to the position in which I was standing.

Our outline statement for the project suggested that

…faith to the provenance, authenticity, veracity and intention of the originating work is less crucial than the possibility of the extensible production of new material given birth through the process, giving free reign to transformative imaginative reconfigurations.

In the event the participants didn't necessarily take the brief quite so literally; Aura Satz and Steve Dorney presented a fascinating range of devices that demonstrated the mechanics of perceptual remapping of sound and image; Jan Thoben and Rob Mullender examined different methods for transforming light into sound, with Rob presenting his photosonic recordings of the show; Andy Birtwistle gave a lecture on experimental film and sound which became all but obfuscated by its own noise in the hands of Rob Mullender's layering manipulation; David Toop presented an intimate and personal essay about the silence of Annabel Nicholson (a version of which is published on his blog).

For my performance Dodgy Provenance and the Fantastic Mundanity of Sound in Space I took the recordings that I had made, looped them and imagined an alternative provenance for them, inventing a narrative which was quite fantastical while tracing a mysterious mundane situation, in effect it became something of a science fiction journey in which the continual presence of the sound of 16mm projectors became reinterpreted as the engines of some kind of implied inter-planetary craft. I performed it as a spoken word text accompanying the relevant sounds, the room in darkness, I was seated behind the audience.

The text was written very quickly and only finished the night before I performed it.  It does, I hope, strike the balance of being a slightly absurd mundanity, perhaps with more work it might have been more outlandish. It was very much an experiment that could become a process applied to any number of sounds, and perhaps I will make more of these in the future. 

Here is a recording of the performance:
  download mp3 

Later that day Duncan White performed A History of the Rectangle.

subsong

subsong 45:00, 2012

[download mp3]


subsong started life as an audio cassette tape found in Bermondsey on Tower Bridge Road. The tape contains music recorded from the radio and dates from, I would guess, the mid 1990s or thereabouts. The main section of the piece was captured with the tape playing on fast forward/cue. The digital audio was then incrementally slowed down to produce continuous sound with a duration of 45 minutes, the capacity of one side of a C90 cassette tape. This extreme processing transforms the base materiality of the analogue tape. The off-speaker microphone recording, the wow & flutter, the tape noise, and the songs of daytime radio, become auratic affect as a continuous slowly changing ambient drone piece, a distant chorus of ghostly voices and sustained (dis)chords in an uneasy false stasis.

A 30 minute version of subsong was made for the 128kbps objects project by or-bits.com presented from 22 – 28 October 2012 at Basic.fm.

subsong on 128kbps objects

Curated by or-bits.com 128kbps objects is a week-long internet radio exhibition which explores ideas of objects in transformation across a variety of artistic practices, mediums and sites. On line from 22 — 28 October 2012 at http://basic.fm/radio. My 30 minute sound piece subsong will play on Saturday 27 October at 3pm.  More information here.

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)

 

Land Gauge

Recently I found this version of my video Land Gauge.  Land Gauge has appeared in various forms and contexts. It first appeared in January 2007 as Direct Language 4.0 on my original Direct Language videoblog.  That version used the sound as recorded with the image although the whole thing is slowed down. In 2008 I made a version for One Minute Volume 2 where it is accompanied by 60/60 a sound piece made when I was at art college in 1981, which was also on the Snatch 3 compilation.  For this version I sped the original 60/60 up so that it would fit within the 60 second parameter of the project.  Later that year it was in the Transcentric show, where it was projected on a small raised platform screen on the floor so that one looked down onto it, replicating the original point of view, as a silent 4 minute loop.  This version was made while preparing the video for Transcentric and compiles several parts of the original sequence, into a kind of extended mix as a continuous 10 minute video, it too is silent.