Time and Tide

The exact title will be a surprise to me but RTÉ Radio 1 will be airing a 10min piece I put together on the inter-tidal zone Monday 25th Oct sometime during the documentary hour 6-7pm Irish time. Listen in if you are within earshot of a radio.

Shortest post ever!

Listen to the podcast here.

Between you and me

I’ll be taking up a place on the Masters in Music and Media Technologies in Trinity at the end of September and moving to Dublin probably mid-September to watch some Fringe shows and seeing as I already have a ticket for Joanna Newsom in the Grand Canal theatre on the 14th, I may as well sort myself out with somewhere to live.

It has been a while since I last updated this blog and Paul has been telling me to pull up my socks, so I should mention myself and Paul Staunton worked on two tiny radio pieces in June/July which we submitted to the Third Coast Audio Short Docs challenge; Book Odds.

Lately, I’m working on putting together a 10min piece for radio based around the intertidal zone. The piece will explore (with words and sounds) how life adapts to adaptation and can in some cases start to depend on it – a liquid that takes its form from the vessel that contains it. A love poem to all those creatures that exist in the in between. Here is a taster. There will be voice over this, so it really is just a flavour of what the piece will be.

For culture night this September 24th I’ll be installing a short audio piece for the Pearse Centre at the Ireland Institute in Dublin. I’m really tempted to use some examples from Roger Casement’s life along with sounds from the intertidal zone for this piece. Casement is a fascinating character who managed to be both coloniser and colonised, British and Irish, hero and anti-hero. I came across some valuable insights into Casement’s life in this book here:

Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland by Rebecca Solnit

It’s always interesting to learn something new about national history from someone from a different country. I was recently turned on to Rebecca Solnit after minding a copy of the Field Guide to Getting Lost for a friend. The Field Guide is definitely the best but there are lots of interesting ideas in Wanderlust and the above book too, both of which I’ve been able to get in my local library. Hoorah for libraries.

TransColonia

I’ll be taking part in TransColonia which opens on Thursday 20th May with a piece called Ash Cloud made in response to Adrian Duncan’s Epiphenomena which showed at The Joinery recently.

Ash Cloud – An unbuilt building that generates clouds. Eyjafjallajökull. A volcano stops travel across Europe. It generates grey clouds of ash, that I crochet and hang in an abandoned Polish travel agency.

TransColonia presents:

recharge: responses to an unbuilt archive
Artists’ responses to unbuilt architectural projects to be displayed in a vacant retail unit in Dublin 1.
recharge is an active investigation into the potential of unrealised, postponed and utopian architectural projects. With sites located in Poland, England and Ireland, the recently assembled unbuilt archive includes an international competition entry, a fictional cloud room and an alternative proposal for a commercial urban site. recharge challenges the normally static nature of an archive by opening it up as a set of instructions and inviting artists’ responses in a workshop context.

The recharge space will be open to the public on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays
from 4.30-7pm, May 20th – June 12th inclusive.

Address: Transcolonia, No.41 Amiens Street, Dublin 1

For information please visit: www.transcolonia.org
Unbuilt Archive by:
MHP Collective, Adrian Duncan, Box Urban, Elaine Hanna, David Shannon

Participating Artists:
Blaithin Quinn, Tunde Toth, Rachel Ní Chuinn, Paul Quinn, Louise Marlborough, Adrian Duncan

Project director: Blaithin Quinn

Email: blaithin_quinn@ireland.com

Wind Song

Using Tuna Pitch to figure out what notes the wind is making

I paid a visit to one of my favourite beaches on the Sligo coast; Trá Bhuí just off the townland of Dunmadden and using the Tuna Pitch app for iPhone, I wrote down the different notes registered by the phone as the wind blew over the microphone. I took these notes and played them back with four different keyboard effects and came up with the following. This is the first version and I’m looking forward to playing around and developing the concept some more.

Wind Song

Supermarket at Kulturhuset, Stockholm

Articule took Beached to Supermarket art fair in Stockholm and I thought since I couldn’t make it to Montreal to see it there I could take a trip to Stockholm. They were having an unusually cold late February so walking around was chilly especially when staying up all night to get an early flight on Sunday morning but the city is stunning so well worth it. This will mostly be a visual entry, I like this photograph a lot, something about the flat diffused light makes the birds look like a pattern.

Kulturhuset is in the centre of the city at Sergels Torg. It has five levels of theatres, dance studios, galleries, cafés and on the ground floor an initiative called Lava where young people are welcome to drop by to do anything from screen-printing to badge-making paying only for the materials used. Supermarket took place on the third and fifth floor. Tack Articule!

Articule Member’s Exhibition

I’m going to be taking part in Articule’s annual member’s show. The exhibition will be happening in the context of a Special Projects (SP) initiated event  À la Dérive/Drift Lines. The SP event is composed of three consecutive segments: Private beach, Member’s beach and Public beach. The three week programming will include a spatial intervention by SP which will turn the gallery into a beach.The Member’s Beach segment will be the member’s exhibition and in the third week during The Public Beach segment the public are invited to respond to the theme with work, performances or whatever other way they see fit.

I have been working on a piece inspired by this youtube clip which makes me think of the aftermath of a relationship. Seeing as I’m not in Montreal at the moment there will be a print out (see below) hanging in the gallery with a url link to a sound piece that people can tear off and listen to elsewhere.  Here is a link to the sound clip: beached

Installation image by Andrew Frosst

Radia, Sound Box and sound workshops – wrapping up Montreal

This week is all about radio. The Magic Sound Box (the second coming) is happening this Thursday 19th Nov at St George’s Anglican Church on Peel and La Gauchtière. Here is a sample of what will be on offer -  Hare in the Snare . Mind your speakers, it ends with sudden loudness. I’m dogsitting at the moment and Smokey’s reaction to the piece is pretty amusing. On the night we will be using a quadraphonic set up so imagine if you will the different tracks coming from different places in the room. And as with buses, good fortune and bad fortune, all things radio come at once, the deadline for CKUT’s new issue of Radia is due on Friday. We’ve been recording all kinds of work noises from meat slicers, photocopiers, meeting clichés, chopping, frying, canning, pickling, beeps, clicks, whirrs, fridge hums and jzejzes, tonight we shall form a human chorus of the above noises to add to the mix. I’m excited. Once the programme is up online, I’ll link to it here. It will be broadcast on CKUT on Weds 2 Dec at 11.00am Montreal time. You can listen live here.

I also gave a workshop on sound art over the weekend as part of CKUT’s training days, it was a good opportunity for me to look back and think about people whose work I really like. Here is Charles Spearin of Do Make Say Think with his amazing take on language and sound – Listen to Ondine. In my brief internet research I also came across a great Guardian article from Steven Poole on the subject published 8 years ago to the day.

For the past couple of months I’ve had the use of the most amazing analogue Korg synth, as I’m tying things up and packing things away the time has almost come to sell my guitar and therefore my amp and as a result I will no longer be able to oscillate waves. I shed a tear and send praises to Iain Cook for his generosity in lending her to me. Here she is the beauty.

Weftawone

I’m back from Toronto, where I got to see my friend’s film Colony, which was launched at TIFF. I ate amazing pho, got to see the two films I wanted to see at the film festival and found the bestest electronics shop in the world ever. It’s run by Hak Wa Chan and despite me obviously not having a clue what I was doing, he was very helpful in pointing me towards resistors and capacitors that might work for whatever malfunctioning circuit I’m planning on building, he showed me a graph, I nodded and was none the wiser. Incidentally if you are from Toronto, you call it Toronno.

The end of September is looking busy, Yan-Yan and I have named our collaboration Weftawone and we are hoping to do a semi-improvised performance at Lab Synthèse on the 25th of this month. The main thing we have been doing together is sound experimentation with textiles and textile tools. Hopefully over the next week or so we’ll borrow a camera and shoot some footage.

CKUT have also decided to go ahead and plan our second magic sound box, it will have a Halloween theme and I’ll be taking advantage of the British Library’s online sound archive in order to develop my part. CKUT’s time is coming around for our next contribution to Radia and my proposal appears to have been accepted so I’ll be coordinating our next piece which will air on 30th of November – the day after I’m due to leave Canada. It’s going to be about work, the sounds we hear in work, the ones we like, the ones we don’t like and how we can make the sounds we don’t like tolerable.

On the subject of work, this is where I work, one day Damiano had to make 500 of these, it reminded me of a) Tribbles and b) Antony Gormley’s Field.

VIVA! and Pop Montreal are both coming up too and I’m planning on volunteering and seeing lots of both and our lease is up so we’ll all be moving out or on. In the meantime as everything seems to be in development, anybody from Ireland should tune into RTE Tuesday 15th at 10.10pm to see Tom Burke’s The Liberties which features music from Tap Tap Click Click.

White Rabbit – Tuairisc

I’m just back from Nova Scotia and attending the first ever White Rabbit. One of the artists in residence Michael Waterman gave me a ride to Upper Economy. Remarkably despite having two audio books in our arsenal, we talked for the whole 14 hours. Michael told me some of his long distance cycling tales and we discussed all the things we find exciting about audio and such. The morning after we got to Red Clay Farm, he started to set up Radio Red Clay, we took over the airwaves and broadcast all week.

Workshops with Michael, Rita McKeough and Heather Lawson took up the first half of the week. We made theremins, carved stone, experimented with home-made instruments and explored performance with 10 of us slowly plotting our way around the farm on stepping stones. Rita gave me the courage to create my first solo performance piece called Inhale/Exhale which partially involved bringing people a km uphill through the woods to an amazing clearing of sweet ferns and a view of the sea. One of the artists Annie Briard wrote about the week and summed up many of the pieces here. Emily Jones’ piece was actually called Home Free and genuinely scared many of the participants including Emily herself as they were led a merry dance into thick forest undergrowth.

Here’s a picture of the beautiful greenhouse where I slept.

View from our bedroom

The greenhouse also housed Radio Red Clay.

Radio Red Clay

One of the highlights of the week was a glorious trip to Thomas Cove, where I fell, narrowly escaping with scrapes and bruises and got to clean out my wounds in the tropical Fundy waters. Being the target that I was for all things winged and whiney, I got a little obsessed and put together this rendition (be careful, it’s loud) of a mosquito chorus courtesy of the Red Clay residents.

Everything culminated on Saturday as we opened our doors to visitors, we had an audio jam with Michael’s band Mannlicher Carcano via Skype, jumped into the pond for White Feather’s piece, got misled in the forest by Emily, recovered on Tom’s swing, waited for dark and jumped into the pond again for Janna and Pamela’s piece, stumbled upon Michael’s feedback and light installation in the forest came back to the bonfire and the fire spectacle that burnt the first ever dowels I ever used.

Sunday, what stragglers remained braved the rickety wooden water slide that travels through the tree tops at Red Clay and spent the evening thinking of band names for Robin, Lian and Raina (Tom’s kids).  The outright winner as far as I’m concerned being The Poplars.

I went on to Halifax with intentions of meeting up with Michael and getting a lift back to Montreal. In an unusually flakey humour I got my timing wrong and ended up having to bus it all the way home. On the plus side I got to see this;

which seemed all the more Nabokovian given that I was reading this.

Other good news for the week was that I heard back from DEAF that they are going to include I know you are alone tonight on their compilation CD this year.

I know you are alone tonight

Hi,

Dublin Electronic Arts Festival are looking for submissions from Irish-based artists  for a compilation for this year’s festival. I’m submitting the following. Deadline is Monday 3rd August.

This piece is just under 3mins. I hope you like it. If possible, please listen on headphones.

http://ia360611.us.archive.org/3/items/IKnowYouAreAloneTonight/alone_tonight.wav