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untitled #305 [seven nights]

“Seven ghostly nights of expanded time and occult sonic space. Venturing into deep realms of audio subtlety and ambiguity. Open to the hearing creativity, sleeping patterns and dreams of the listener. A piece that blurs the limits between composition and sound environment.”
[Pedro Higueras, Sonom Studios]

Total duration: 56 hours
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WARNING: Virtually all the audio content in these recordings is completely inaudible through laptop or equivalent small speakers. Good quality speakers or headphones are highly recommended.

First released as seven 8-hour long mp3 44kHz/128kbps files on a SD-HC memory card (self-released) on January 2013.

Created at mobile messor (Den Haag), winter 2012-13.
(c) francisco lópez 2013 – www.franciscolopez.net

Immaterial reissue by nowhere [worldwide] 2018

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The Tonic Garden: a sonic survey of soothing sounds

The Tonic Garden was the first programme in the ‘Bedside Radio’ series produced by Mark Vernon for hospital radio station, Radio Royal. It was created as part of a two-year digital arts residency at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Larbert, Scotland.

This programme was designed as an ambient radio artwork, a peripheral listening experience created with patients suffering from insomnia or tinnitus in mind. Keenly aware of the difficulties of sleeping in the unfamiliar and often noisy environment of a busy hospital the focus was on providing patients with some form of escape. It was made for a situation in which a kind of unfocussed, undemanding form of listening is expected and the non-linear, non- narrative format is a reflection of this. Listeners can drop in and out at any point and pick up listening again at another time. The voice interviews were initially intended just as research in this survey of soothing sounds but the descriptions and reasoning behind the choices ended up becoming an intrinsic part of the work itself. Field recordings and bespoke music are combined with voices to create an illustrated aural survey polling the sounds that were found to be the most relaxing.

The Tonic Garden reflects the range of sounds suggested by staff at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Radio Royal volunteers, the FDAMH media group and the public at large and features original music and field recordings created by Mark Vernon and Ian Middleton.

The programme was first broadcast on a continuous loop over the patient’s bedside monitor system at Forth Valley Royal for a two-week period in 2013. It has since been aired in full on Soundart Radio, Resonance FM and Basic FM and was featured as a two-part edition of Framework:afield.

This project was supported by Creative Scotland and NHS Forth Valley

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Deep Sleep Trawler

The third programme in the ‘Bedside Radio’ series originally produced for Radio Royal (NHS Forth Valley’s hospital radio network) as part of a two-year period as digital artist in residence at the hospital.

Interview recordings of recollected dreams by patients and staff were gathered with the intention of creating a database or ‘dream bank’ to provide sleep deprived hospital patients with the opportunity of sharing someone else’s dreams. In the end this collection of dreams was plundered to create a series of composed radio dreamscapes connecting the various themes identified within the interview material. Combined with atmospheric soundbeds created from processed electronic sounds and field recordings the effect is a sort of non-narrative radio play where dream logic rules. The piece is, in part, a homage to Barry Bermange and Delia Derbyshire’s 1964 radio work, ‘Inventions for Radio: Dreams’.

Also included are readings of extracts from the dream diaries of artist, shamen and dream interpreter, Kate Walters, interviews made by Radio Royal volunteers and interviews with members of the FDAMH arts and media group.

Following the initial broadcast on the hospital’s patient monitor system this piece has also aired on Resonance 104.4FM, Soundart Radio. A new version was created specially for Radio Cona in 2017.

This project was supported by Creative Scotland and NHS Forth Valley.

Image courtesy of ‘A Sense of Someplace’

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Music for Sleeping & Waking Minds

Music for Sleeping & Waking Minds (2011-2012) is a new, overnight work in which four performers fall asleep while wearing custom designed EEG sensors which monitor their brainwave activity. The data gathered from the EEG sensors is applied in real time to different audio and image signal processing functions, resulting in continuously evolving multi-channel sound environment and visual projection. This material serves as an audiovisual description of the individual and collective neurophysiological state of the ensemble. Audiences are invited to experience the work in different states of attention: while alert and asleep, resting and awakening.

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Under The Couch

This CD album also includes a booklet with an essay by Lucia Farinati This recording was made under the famous couch of Dr. Sigmund Freud at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of the Psychoanalysis, lived here 1938-1939. The house is now the Freud Museum [www.freud.org.uk]. From the museum’s website: Freud’s couch, upon which his patients would comfortably recline during psychoanalytic sessions, was normally covered by an Oriental rug throw. Underneath the throw, it is a plain and simple structure, raised by a scroll and pad at one end, though fully upholstered with springs and horsehair stuffing. The couch is rather short, so that the patient would not lie horizontally, but with the head quite high, supported by several cushions and pillows. According to Freud’s wife Martha, in an interview with Princess Marie Bonaparte in 1938, the couch was given to Freud by a grateful patient, a Madame Benvenisti, in about 1890.

The most important thing with this project is the method, the attitude and the process of doing it, doing the recording UNDER the famous couch, As a sort of parallel to the psychoanalytic method. And presenting it as a report from this «underworld». Using the recording devices as tools for to detect, for to extract what might be hidden there through more than 100 years of Psychoanalytic practice.

You can see this audio CD as a report from this investigation of the sounding «unconsciousness», the couch’s unconsciousness if I may say so. I have been working with the recorded material, trying to extract some «information» out of it. I am happy with the result.

The delicate and subtle information are there of course, but maybe difficult to hear. That’s how it should be. It is more about that this is done, and the «method» than anything else. The interpretation is up to the listener. Recorded on the 14th of September 2011.

Recording devices: ZOOM H4n, Voice Recorder Diasonic DDR-5000, Mini Cassette Recorder Olympus S701. Cover and label photographs by LE taken during the recording session. Many thanks to the Freud Museum for so generously having me under the couch. Special thanks to Lucia Farinati and Dr. Sigmund Freud.

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Artist at Sleep

”Artist at Sleep“ is a sound intervention exploring articulation of bare human presence through medium of sound and addresses the state of sleep as a creative moment in contrast to the idea that the creativity can only result from conscious activity. The title of the work ”Artist at Sleep“, pays direct tribute to Mladen Stilinović’s conceptual piece ”Artist at Work“ (1978), and Andy Warhol’s film ”Sleep“ (1963).

Installed closely to the artist’s sleeping body at night, several microphones were used to record the breathing and minute body movements in a silent bedroom, occasionally registering distant sounds of the city outside.

The resulting sound is being played through a large-scale speaker installation ”KLANGHIMMEL“ in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier at night. The sonic presence of an amplified and enlarged sleeping body is created, lying quietly on the square.

The projection of the intimate sounds of the sleeping artist via an array of loudspeakers onto a vast public square transforms what was initially unintentional into a performative act.

The ambiguous tensions brought out through this displacement create a paradoxical space, where the sonic presence of the sleeping body becomes ubiquitous yet foreign, performative yet not, public and intimate, all in the same moment.

2011. Multichannel sound intervention. 300min.
To be played late at night (2am-7am)

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Stream of Unconscious

The Stream of Unconscious is a single work composed of 24 albums on 12 cassette tapes. Each album forms a single chapter of the novella written by Bryan Lewis Saunders using the stream of unconscious method of writing, whereby he transcribes his unconscious dream descriptions and somniloquy. The vocals on each album are the source material for the writings and at times are manipulated by the artists/musicians involved.

Instructions: Play on repeat with headphones on while falling asleep and the bobcat will enter your dream. Adjust volume for comfort. It may take a couple of tries on consecutive nights and a slight familiarity with the text.

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EDEN EDEN EDEN

EDEN EDEN EDEN (2009) is an overnight audiovisual performance and memory processing ritual that takes place between midnight and 7 am. It is composed of continuous live sound and film projections. An ensemble of musicians gradually assemble and disassemble a 26-voice chord; the chord is built as a 13-part natural harmonic series that continuously beats in near-unison with itself. A projector shows three superimposed films of original Super-8 film materials by Chloe Griffin. The films are prepared as continuously extending loops, and recorded onto a single video. Aural and visual acts become chaotically resonant through their continual repetition. Members of the audience, who are invited to sleep during the performance, shift between waking and dreaming states. Afterwards, their memories coincide.

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Autohagiography

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James Webb, “Autohagiography,” 2007, voice recordings of the artist under hypnosis broadcast from speakers sewn into the headrest of a black, leather chaise longue.

The artwork is in the collection of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Gqeberha, South Africa.

Above image from MMXII, James Webb’s survey exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2012. Photograph by Anthea Pokroy.

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45 minutes from underneath the beds

Recorded, mixed, and adapted at Firework Edition, Stockholm, December 1999. This is the second recording/track in a series called From Underneath The Beds, adventures and researches under different beds wherever or whenever they appear. Reissue of Absurd # 6 with bonus tracks (tracks 2 to 7).

This particular piece opens with a brief, distorted (can’t tell if the manipulation was electronic or organic) somewhat stream-of-consciousness monologue (a letter to someone?) about the advantages of the bathroom over other rooms in an abode, which then segues into what I’d gather is a suicide note. As the narration continues, a slow rumbling percussion fades in and then eventually out. This lasts for about five minutes. The last 40 minutes is abstract drone, etc.

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