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)