6 Jun 2011

Craft

Bell_is_a_cup

It has proven difficult to track down some of the craft activities needed to supply some of the sound textures that I want to weave into each track.

Glass blowers, for example, seem particularly thin on the ground. I’d like to collect sounds of glass blowing for a hotspot located next to a cabinet of glassware in the C20th Art and Design room. The two glassblowers I did manage to track down each told me that their scientific work doesn’t involve all the shimmering heat, roaring furnaces and huffing-and-puffing that I had imagined. Potters, too, necessary for the hotspot near Mr. Willett’s Popular Pottery, all seem to have gone electric. What I wanted was the rasp and report of a foot-operated treadle pumping up and down.

I am cursing myself for spending so long thinking through what I wanted to do, rather than just getting on with things. I am trying not to be disheartened and have been putting the feelers out through as many friends as I can. I’m sure someone will come up trumps and I’ll soon be squatting down with a microphone next to a wet lump of spinning clay.

In the meantime, I’ve put Plan B into operation and, through a friend’s help, I manage to get a tour of the workshop facilities at City College Brighton. Early one morning, as the cleaners are finishing hoovering, I meet Chris Hill, the Course Leader of the Foundation Degree in Fine Art. Chris leads me around all the different machines that might be used in the construction of metalware: spot welders, grinders, drills, guillotines, anvils, polishers and buffers.

All most all of my previous field-recordings have been made outside amongst the wind and the elements; I’m also often struggling to isolate a particular sound from a clamorous background of other sounds. In the City College, though, once the hoovers were switched off, the workshops were actually very tranquil, with very little sound bleeding in from the road outside or from neighbouring rooms and corridors. It took be a good few minutes to adjust to the different approach to recording: to drop the recording level, to remove the windshield and to appreciate the great luxury of being able to ask for a sound to be repeated.

(download)

 

6 Jun 2011

Henry Willett, Esq., Of Brighton

Willetts

1266. Mug. Cream ware, printed and coloured with ploughing with inscription “The Weathers fare, the Season’s now, Drive on my Boys, God speed the Plough”. H. 4 in. c. 1780

486. Plaques, a pair. Earthenware, with bos of Fox and Pitt in relief. 6 by 5.5 in. c. 1800

274. Pipe. Earthenware. A man astride a barrel. H 6.5 in. c. 1790.

Henry Willett was one of the Victorian characters behind the founding of the Museum. Willett, who was born in the local town of Newhaven, collected fossils before turning his attention to pottery and art. A friend of John Ruskin, to whom he offered some of his finds, his collection was enabled by the money made through his businesses, including brewing.

In one reference that I found, Ruskin praised the “magnificence … unsurpassable beauty [and] extreme interest” of the objects Willett had intended as gifts. But from what I understand of the Willett’s collection that was first lent to the Museum (in the 1870s) and then donated (in 1903), this sense of the rare and the splendid did not really animate his pursuit of pottery and porcelain. Rather than being constituted by unique treasures, the ceramic collection that Willett bequeathed to the Museum represented something more deliberately mundane. This was the “homely pottery”, that Willett believed could trace "the history of a country”.

Stella Beddoe, Senior Keeper and Keeper of Decorative Art at the Museum, gave me an copy of the 1899 catalogue that was produced for Willett’s collection when it was on loan to the V & A (though the collection “illustrating popular British history” was consigned to the Bethnal Green outpost rather than displayed in all its colloquial glory in the halls of South Kensington). Three entries from the catalogue start this post. The pages of the catalogue have turned the most delicate of browns that darken towards the stitching. The pages give off a slightly stale odour that is not at all unpleasant.

Willett’s perspective resonates with much more contemporary ideas. His identification of the values of a history learnt from everyday life chimes with some of what Richard Hoggart was saying in the 1950s in Uses of Literacy about mass and popular culture and with parallel ideas about ‘le quotidien’ from French thinkers in the 1960s like Lefebvre and De Certeau. There is also a sense that what Willett’s project – like Henry Wellcome’s – was a precursor to what late twentieth century archaeologists, and anthropologists came to call ‘material culture’.

 

12 Jun 2011

Fake Murano

Murano

Ever since I saw the cabinet of glassware in the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery through the different eyes of someone who was no longer just visiting, I thought of Murano.


I have never been to Murano but believed I knew it: an island in the Venice lagoon renowned for its artisanal glass-making. Even though I had a sense of the island’s pre-eminence – wasn’t it once the only place in Europe where mirrors were made? didn’t its citizens accrue special privileges yet could never leave? – my imagination refused to cross the borders of the small scale. In my imaginary Murano, there were narrow alleys, open shutters spilling light, a lone voice bouncing of the walls, the occasional dog bark, lapping water, creaking wooden quays, a sea bird’s cry, a fog bank drawing in over the swamp just before the rude diesel of a barge swung past.

Talking about my ideas to the Soundwaves Festival director, Claudia Molitor, she presented a very different Murano. The island she spoke of was much, much bigger in scope, a finished town of wide canals, painted houses, bridges and churches, everywhere bustling with tourists, catered to shop after shop. The wooden quays were still there, though.

Returning home, I looked at my copy of Jan Morris’ “Venice” which I assumed must have been one of the sources of my fantasy Murano. Leafing through the pages highlighted in the Index, it became clear quite how far into whimsy I had drifted, perhaps tugged in that direction by some of Morris’ discussion of the smaller islands out in the lagoon.

“… For the rest, Murano is a clutter of small glass factories, rambling, messy, uncoordinated places, built of red or dingy stonework, with tall blackened chimneys and wooden landing-stages … The important thing to know about the Murano glass-makers is that almost everything they make is, at least to my taste, perfectly hideous. This has always been so”.

I find intriguing some of the kitschest excesses that emerged from the furnaces of Murano. I’m not sure I’d want any of them on my desk, but I’m glad that other people find a space in their taste for them and can do that without having recourse to ‘irony’. And of course, not all glassware that comes from Murano has the bilious colours and grotesques shapes that invoke such horrible fascination for Morris. Foscarini, for example, is based in Murano and theirs is understood to constitute a rather more refined aesthetic. I saved up and bought my wife a red Rodolfo Dordoni “Lumiere XX” lamp. And, through the strange way that objects move round houses, that has ended up on the table I’m using as a desk.

Even after Morris, I just couldn’t rid myself of the whole atmosphere of the fog-bound island, silted canals, wrecks, distant sea-birds and footsteps on stonework. Searching through my hard-drives, I began to find recordings that I’d previously made that could work together to fake the Murano of my dreams. Here were some scratching cicadas, distant voices and domestic sounds of a village evening in Crete; here was a wooden harbour creaking above a lake in Eastern Finland; here were some frogs in a rice paddy in Japan; here in a box I took down from the attic was a DAT tape of a barge chugging past on the river Cam that I recorded eight years ago while my daughter was asleep in her pram.

Shaping these recordings a little by raising or lowering their frequencies or shifting the distribution of energy (=volume) they contained and then layering them on top of one another, I’ve managed to create something whose acoustic contours approximated the fake Murano. In the four days that remain, I just need to find the right bugling call of a herring gull and decide just where to put it.

Diana_desk

Angus Carlyle's Space

This is a blog that charts the progress of the "Noli Me Tangere" commission for the Soundwaves Festival 2011 in Brighton. Posts are 'live' in the sense that they will only appear while I am working on this project (and in its immediate aftermath). Posts are 'raw' in the sense that I am using this Posterous blog more as a thinkspace - a scrapbook, a sketchpad - than as anything more polished or resolved. There will be typos and mistakes just as there will be changes of tack and contradictions.

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