Category: audio

Music for Alice Doušová’s film, Kinloss.
2021

Danish shipping company Maersk Line owns the largest containership fleet in the world, with over 600 vessels at its command. A multi-billion dollar industry invisible to many (yet involved in 90% of all cargo transport), a career in shipping promises significant financial reward- let alone the timeless allure of adventure upon the waves.

As Kinloss aims for the next port and day merges into night, we embark on a journey of our own: roaming between the waves and the sky, the control centre and the engine room, the canteen and living quarters. This behemoth of a ship carries a multi-million dollar cargo, along with 23 men and women from around the world- all subject to its strange version of place and time.

As we witness the continual activity demanded by the vessel and its schedule, we hear conversations with members of the crew- and the hidden reality of their work gradually permeates what we see. On board for up to nine months, their experience ranges from Ryan, a young Engine Cadet three months into his first contract, to Captain Kyaw Thu Ya, with over 33 years of employment at Maersk.

Just as the contents of the containers is never known, the identity of those we hear floats just beyond our reach. But through these reflective, personal recordings, the voices and stories of those who facilitate our global consumerism travel to us on land: sharing the possibilities, and costs, of a life spent at sea.

The filmmaker shot the tons of steel moving between Busan and Shenzhen as both a wasteland inhabited by a few human beings and an industrial monument to the cold beauty and helplessness of the advanced phase of consumer capitalism. Fragments of cabins, decks, engines, massive ropes and breathtaking views of the sea complement the depersonalised narratives of a cosmopolitan line-up of employees of the world’s largest transport corporations.

Dan Hayhurst: Dell computer, Uher 4000 tape recorder, Sony ‘my first Sony’ Walkman, Soundcraft EPM6 mixer, Oto Machines BIM 12-bit stereo delay unit, Elektron Digitakt

Reuben Sutherland: Technics SL-1200 turntable, Sony NEX 6 camera, paper phenakistiscopes (all designs R Sutherland, printing by Snappy Snaps)

Recorded live 11 December 2020. London

Originally streamed @More Kicks Than Friends 18 December 2020 youtu.be/OExk9VhrS90

Thanks @Ned Rush

Audiovision above

Visionaudio below

Fanfic Telepresence by Sculpture, August 2020

Fanfic Telepresence is a 20 minute documentary configuration of everyday cornucopia, tapes and synthesizer gnarl, conversational fragments, observations, juxtapositions, sensory punchlines, redirected energy, pattern, speculation.

We made this for Channel9319062‘s DREAM APPOLCALYPSE, streamed live 8 September 2020. What you see changes what you hear and what you hear changes what you see. Structure, harmony and discord come and go. It’s a (time) travelogue made in lockdown. Objects and situations lose their original meaning and communicate something else. The music is electromechanical. The pause control of a Uher 4000 tape recorder (Education Authority Unit) sees heavy action. Entities transmit by telepresence, inhabit places, objects and organisms, impersonate themselves.

Projected Reworks is now available on all streaming services. Buying directly via Bandcamp supports creators.

This digital release comes free with every physical purchase of Sculpture – Projected Music 5”(tropes004) available here: plasticinfinite.bandcamp.com/album/projected-music

Projected Reworks is eight commissioned tracks by artists who use the turntable as an instrument. Using only physical copies of Sculpture’s 5-inch locked groove animated picture disc ‘Projected Music’, Dan Hayhurst’s sonic material containing 26 loops are transfigured into new imaginings by some of the most prominent and inventive artists working in the field.

These reworks range from free improvised one-take sessions such as Marriam Rezaei’s effervescent experimental turntablism to Graham Dunning’s cut-up and reconstructed discs utilizing kids 6” discs from the 1960s with aid from his mechanical techno process and sprinkled toasted almonds. Janek Schaefer’s lament is inspired by a web of lies using his two tonearm turntable to spin the grooves in dialogue arguing with each other resulting in them droning on and on. Maria Chavez, having published a handbook in experimental turntable technique, fragments a poetic and almost Basinskiesque lullaby with a sense of (be)longing.

Philip Jeck provides two very different perspectives, the first sounds like a deranged merry-go-round with a faulty motor while the second takes us to even darker distorted territories as he mangles through warped convolutions of manual pitch shifting and lo-fi effects. Tom Richards uses his own invented synthesiser modules which allows him to control the motor of three modified turntables through the use of syncopated voltage control resulting in a 10-minute saga. Me, Claudius’s use of room recordings amplifying through phased guitar amps with blips and lighter sparks feels as if we are present in the room, witnessing every tactile gesture whilst intoxicated by the butane

Music by Dan Hayhurst and above artists
Artwork by Reuben Sutherland
Compiled by Steven McInerney
A Psyché Tropes Release. Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
www.psyche-tropes.com

released November 30, 2019