New tape out with Sam Andreae (London) and Yan Jun (Bejing) on Wigan’s Steep Gloss label. Improvisation recorded in real time in November 2020.
“Plugged into our impossible online room, triangulated between Beijing, London & Manchester via autonomous noise unit, we clicked here and there to tune into each other and quickly imagined an ecstatic Morbid Angel covers band, riding waves of device distortion and 5000 miles of time delay. I was on an aural noise high for hours after the session just like that first time seeing LOUD bands in the Princess Charlotte in Leicester as a kid, inaudible, cloth eared to the teachers at school the next day. A private underwater sound joy.”
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Had a great walk and exploration in the Prestwich/Whitefield area 3 miles north of Manchester city centre for the latest episode of Walking & Talking with sound artist Lee Patterson last week. We talk about insects, bird calls, badgers, ways into listening and sound and the enclosures act amongst other things! Lee made some unique hyrdophone recordings to test a new set he had built which end the show in parallel with Lee’s commentary on whats happening in the recordings. Its a really engaging listening exactly what I hoped the shows might be like when I first started them!
I’m super pleased to say that I’ve been awarded an Arts Council England grant to help support the Wanderlust project; developing 6 episodes of my podcast Walking and Talking which go out on Camp Radio the radio/podcast platform for Camp.
The beautiful poster for the project has been created by painter Mio Ebisu. You can see the two original works she made for the project at the bottom of the post. As part of the project I’ve had been really lucky to have some bespoke production training with Becca Gaskell which has really helped the process of putting the episodes together.
You can hear the first episode this Thursday 27th May at 11am CET with my guest for the month Richard Harrison.
Richard is probably the only person I know who has both toured with Nico (of Velvet Underground fame) and played Derek Bailey’s Company Week. He’s been active in bands since the late 70s starting out with The Mud Hutters a post punk group which featured his cousin Mark and rehearsed on the family farm, which is not far from where we are today walking today. He went on to play with an amazing array of bands including Manchester new wave group Dislocation Dance, NYCs’ God is my Co-Pilot, The Honkies alongside Caroline Kraabel, Kathy Hulme, Andy Diagram and John Edwards, in Graham Massey’s Toolshed and Paddy Steer’s Homelife project. He also toured all over the world with his duo Spaceheads with trumpeter Andy Diagram. Alongside the band projects Richard has been active as an improviser in Manchester & London and has an ongoing project making field recordings of wire fence harmonics generated winds on his brother in laws farm in Scotland.
Pleased to say that an outdoor improvisation from a month or so ago has surface on the Sippy Cup bandcamp page. A recording made with THF Drenching, Kate Armitage and Lowri Evans in Alexandra Park Whalley Range, Manchester. God is in the TV zine wrote a review of it here.
I have a new monthly radio show Walking & Talking on http://listen.camp where I get a musician to take me on a walk somewhere special/interesting to them and record the ensuing conversation. Sometimes we might play music or not. The first episode Walking & Talking with Alex Pierce is now available to stream anytime. It’s an exploration of the former docklands area known as Pomona which lies just west of Manchester City Centre. Alex knows this area really well through the plant life that grows there. There is a lot of very useful information about mugwort in the episode as well as nettles, coltsfoot, epigenetic, animism and some guitar and scrap metal improvisation. You can hear Alex’s music as Yet Gel here, check his monthly NTS radio show here and check the band Historically Fucked we are in here.
Really pleased that a piece from my ongoing research at Pomona Island in Manchester’s former docks is included in the Becoming Earthly Film season which is instigated by The Barn Arts in Aberdeen and runs 12th-20th of March. My piece is twinned with Hayley Suviste’s excellent work Edgelands which premiered at HCMF last year and explores similar ideas to my work from a different angle. There will be a Q and A with us both and curator Huw Wahl online as part of the season.
Short 16mm film and sound piece made with filmmaker Huw Wahl. This is an exploration for a longer work we are developing at the minute thinking through collaborative creative processes, lines of travel, and the access/redevelopment of interstice sites on the River Mersey/Manchester Ship Canal.
Really pleased that 3 pieces of music I’ve been involved with making and a short interview were included in a Manchester special episode of BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show last night. One of the pieces was the first ever public presentation from work in progress on my MA. That piece is a recorded performance except made around Pomona Island. You can also hear some of mine and Otto Willberg‘s Murky Sovereignty record which was released last year on Cafe Oto’s Taku Roku label and an excerpt from Watergrove II a moorland/treeline improvisation made above Rochdale with my fine colleagues Adam Fairhall, Fran Comyn and Michael Perrett You can listen again for 30 days.
David Birchall 