And so the Queen is dead, and the bell tolls 96 times – what can be drawn from this dull and dutiful repetition, dong, dong, dong, neither building nor climaxing, an endless anticipation, a ceremony of the senses, an everything of nothing, a shrill shell.
Let us take just one single toll of the bell and see if out of that metal on metal we can conjure something befitting…
I give you The Ringing of a Bell
released September 12, 2022
Philip Sanderson: treatments. Unknown Bell Ringer: Bell
So in pursuance of my (further) investigations into noise-sound I have been working on a couple of new long form pieces namely ‘LOST WITH ALL HANDS (The Legend of Goodwin Sands)’, and ‘The Mourning After’.
Goodwin Sands is a sandbank off the coast of Deal in Kent notorious as the site of shipwrecks and the loss over centuries of thousands of seafarers’ lives. At first Goodwin Sands was nothing more than a handy working title for a piece I was making using various noise-sounds such as squeaky gates and bowed cymbals treated using granular synthesis. The shifting patterns and textures had some loose approximation or analogue with the dynamics of the sandbank and having seen a copy of a second hand book about the Goodwin Sands in a local shop I adopted the name, but the initial idea was not to represent or make a piece about the sands per se.
The piece was taking form and as part of the general research one does around such things I came across a folk song by George Gilbert entitled ‘The Legend of The Goodwin Sands’ (1974) which originally appeared on the 1974 LP Medway Flows Softly - Songs of Kent by George Gilbert. The LP was one of those privately pressed LPs of folk music that were released in the 1960s and 70s. It contains a number of often humorous songs many of them based in and around places or events in the Medway Towns where I grew up. George Gilbert wrote all the songs and provides the inter track introductions. Many of the numbers on the LP feature a full band and other singers though ‘The Legend of The Goodwin Sands’ is just Gilbert himself on vocals and a wind/water background sound.
With some suitable treatment the song fitted well overlaid in the centre of the piece I had already made. Fitted almost too well for no sooner was it part of the composition than the various noise-sounds which previously had maintained an abstracted relation to one another began to morph into representations of location sounds. A bubbling sound became water, the overlaid granular synthesized bowed cymbal the creaking of the vessels, other tones took on the mantle of wind and waves. In short the noise-sounds began to before my ears loose their autonomy and become illustrations of the text of the folk song.
With some judicious mixing and copious editing I found a sufficient tension and distance between the song and the noise-sounds could be maintained to make the piece ‘work’, but it was close, had I started with the song and then added the noise-sound I fear all would have been lost (at sea) as it would have been difficult not to hear the noise-sounds as nautical sound effects from the off.
In contrast with side A which as has probably been inferred took some time side B, ‘The Mourning After’ was a relatively quick affair employing pulse comb filters excited by a range of audio sources including location recordings in Kent, vocals and shortwave radio. I had been experimenting with the pulse comb patch for a good six months and had a number of takes none of which seemed to quite hot the mark, but having completed side one and with its theme in mind I had another go and managed to improvise the track in a couple of takes.
