Lumière et Son Revisited

Ten years ago in November 2009 Sam Renseiw and I started a year-long collaboration called Lumière et Son, a vlog as they were then called. Sam made the Lumières, minute long videos in the style of the original Lumière Brothers silent one-reel films such as La Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon (1985), to which I then added sound. The videos were originally shown on line at the rate of roughly once a week, but as serendipity would have it they were ideal for the Kerry Baldry curated One Minute programmes, and so somewhat paradoxically several of the pieces reached another (and often wider) audience in the more traditional context of the screening room. 

To commemorate the ten-year interval I have for the last three weeks or so been posting the videos in chronological order on the Snatch Tapes Instagram page. Here also is the text of a presentation I gave at London South Bank University a couple of years ago when showing five or so of the pieces at a colloquium.

‘Lumière et Son’: a collaborative videoblog by Thomas Wiesner (Bergen School of Architecture) and Philip Sanderson (London South Bank University)

Paper by Philip Sanderson presented as part of The City as Modernist Ephemera, a one day colloquium at London South Bank University Friday 16th Jun 2017. 

The modern city and cinema grew together symbiotically, the one reframing the other in a form of topographical dance. We understand, and to some degree, live the city through the screen and the films that depict it, which in turn transform the streets into a soundstage, a mise-en-scène of often small ephemeral gestures. 

The city that never sleeps is all bustle and movement, and from early avant-garde films such as Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera (1929) or Berlin Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) by Walter Ruttman, through to more contemporary examples such as Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), filmmakers have sought to capture the futuristic movement, sound and speed of the city. To do this the full arsenal of cinematography and editing techniques have been deployed: using combinations of montage, superimposition, camera pans, dolly shots, cranes, helicopters, fast editing, etc. All in an attempt to depict the crowds, moving cars, busses trams, trains and general hubbub of the city.

The inspiration for the project I’m talking about today by Lumière et Son predates all of this by taking us back to one of the very first films, the Lumière Brothers La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895). This silent one-reel film shot from a fixed tripod, lasts approximately 46 seconds and it was this form, that was perhaps surprisingly adopted in 2007 by Andreas Pedersen and Brittany Shoot and applied to making contemporary online video work. The constraints were that the videos should be no more than one minute in duration shot from a fixed camera, with no zooms, edits or sound. Such videos were named  ‘Lumières’ and Pedersen and Shoot set up a web site where contributions could be indexed and linked.  An enthusiastic adopter of the Lumière form was Thomas Wiesner a Danish architect who works under the online pen name of Sam Renseiw. Sam made a large number of Lumières and here I quote from an essay by Michael Spazkowski (2012) characterized by. “…a profound sensitivity to space and to how people and objects move along variously restricted and open trajectories”

Renseiw became a prolific maker of Lumières producing over 400. So much for the Lumière what of the Son? This is where I came in as the 'Mr. Sound' in what developed into a year long collaborative project in which a new one-minute piece combining moving and image with sound was uploaded to the Lumière et Son blog on a weekly basis where it was accompanied by a couple of lines that portray a fictionalised day-to-day artistic practice, somewhat spoofing the videoblog’s usual diaristic nature. So the first entry describes a meeting, “Lumière was studying a composition through a concrete letterbox at the Barbican, whilst Son was listening to music from Baron Blood", or “Lumière takes in a fine Polish performance, whilst Son only has ears for the Portsmouth Sinfonia and eyes for the Sugar Plum Fairy”. These small fragments built-up over the course of the year an online work  composed like the city of several fragments that could be recompiled in any

way the viewer chooses.

But hang on - on the face of it Sam’s Lumières are not in need of audio intervention, however to quote Spazkowski “Another defining stamp (of Wiesner’s Lumières) is a musician’s sensitivity to rhythm and tempo” this together with the fixed camera makes Wiesner’s Lumières especially receptive to the addition of sound, not used it must be empasised to reinforce the visual but to extend and develop it, to use sound to reframe and recontextualise what we are seeing, creating an audio-visual dialectic   

A guiding principle and influence in the use of audio within the project was John Smith's 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum. The film opens with footage of what looks to be an everyday East London street scene; various people go about their business, walking left then right, crossing the road, pausing a moment and so on. What transforms the footage is an authoritative male voice-over that appears to direct the ‘action’ by issuing a series of instructions such as: “now I want the old man with white hair and glasses to cross the road, come on quickly”.  A ‘cue’ that is immediately followed by a bespectacled elderly man appearing from left of the screen, before quickening his pace as he crosses the street. A stream of other such commands by the ‘director’ are given and each time the on screen ‘characters’ seemingly reacts accordingly. It takes a few moments before we realise the artifice of a voce over added afterwards rather than being recorded simultaneously. 

Smith actively plays with the deception for only some of the street action is directed, and there are moments of absurdity such as when pigeons are asked to fly past, and the hands of a clock are told how fast to rotate. This all serves to confuse and upsets the linear temporal logic of the piece before finally the ‘director’ reveals that he is elsewhere, speaking from a field many miles away. What in part Smith is exploiting is the inherent adhesion between sound and image.

Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov were the first to notice this adhesive quality in their 1928 Statement on Sound. Whilst they feared (and rightly so) that sound would be used to reinforce image, to create an hermetically sealed story world, the adhesive properties can also be used dialectically. If this causal link is broken, an asynchronous ‘push-pull’ dynamic is created, as seen in Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum, in which we are seduced by the voice appearing to direct the ‘action’ in the street, before the realisation that the voice was added post-filming, makes us reframe our view of the footage. Nonetheless, momentary adhesion occurs throughout the piece, and there is an ongoing revelation of the audio-visual mechanism at work. Several of The Lumière et Son pieces use variations on this ‘push-pull’ technique, with both voice and music employed to draw out and counterpoint elements within the moving image.

Though I make music myself the audio used in Lumière et Son was predominantly ‘found sound’ taken from a range of sources, including shortwave recordings, film and television soundtracks, YouTube videos, etc. These eclectic sources, mostly originating online providing the scope for a wide range of reframings.

Square Dance (2010) as with Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum,uses the voice as the key audio reframing device. The voice-over from a YouTube line-dancing tutorial repeatedly counts out a series of steps, “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight”. The footage shows a Polish square, which members of the public traverse at different angles and speeds going about their business. As the figures cross the square,many of them appear to fall into step, and in time with the counting, as if following the instructions. The correspondence is often brief, but for these instances, voice and image adhere on screen, and become located in the motion of the pedestrian, before the person falls out of step or exits the frame, only for a new synchronisation to occur as another person approaches from a different angle. We move seamlessly between everyday ambulation and the performative.

Spring Greens (2010) shows a young man and woman in a Danish park/garden. The man has a camera and gestures to the woman who removes her coat and begins to strike various fashion-shoot poses, whilst on the soundtrack we hear a couple talking. The on-screen couple are too far away for their lips to be seen, but their actions and gestures seem matched with the flow and tone of the discussion; she striking a pose after being asked to, he crouching to take a shot before we hear the shutter click. We at first assume that the sound and image are from the same location. The sonorities of the recording are however more interior than exterior, and though unlike Square Dancewhere there is a continual push-pull revelation, here we more slowly begin to question whether what we are listening to is actually from the park. For cineastes there is maybe a certain familiarity about the dialogue, and some will recognise it is as being taken (un-edited) from the soundtrack to Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) with the couple in the Danish park unwitting engaged in a remake or re-enactment of the photo shoot scene originally played by the actors, David Hemmings and Veruschka. 

As per the prediction in the ‘Statement’ (Eisenstein et al, 1928) that synchronised sound would be usedto provide “a certain “illusion" of talking people”, dialogue has developed as the key way in which a faux naturalistic world is created in mainstream cinema. Here the intention is to disrupt such certainties by creating a false adhesion, synchronising voice and action, but with dialogue that slowly reveals itself to be from outside the frame, indeed from a completely different film.  

In these two examples (Letterboxing, Goings On (2010)) it is music that is used as the principle reframing device. In commercial cinema, music is used to heighten on screen action, be it soaring strings during a love scene, or fast tempo beats to accompany a car chase. As Hamlyn (2003, pp167) puts it “music controls the emotional response to a scene”, thereby making it difficult for the audience to create their own reading. The mechanism by which this works is paradoxical, in that though Gidal (1989, pp 29) describes music as“filling the image”, in the context of narrative cinema, music is often sublimated, bound inside the image, almost unnoticed, with the visual element, the ‘action’, deemed to be what is emotive. 

Letterboxing, Goings On and Nutcracking which we saw at the start are examples of pieces that intentionally use music to reframe the visual, seeking to foreground its role in shaping our perceptions. This approach is a combination of that used by Chris Marker in La Jetée, in which sections o Boosey & Hawkes film library music help imbue the sequence of photographs with meanings and quasi-cinematic resonance; along with a nod (once again) to Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum, except in this case, instead of the voice, it is the music ‘directing’ the images.

Letterboxing shows a small group of girls playing rounders. We only see the lower half of the girls’ torsos, with the image cut off by a concrete lintel (creating the letterbox window), nor are the other players or the ball visible; all the ‘action’ is off-screen. Juxtaposed with this image is music from the soundtrack to Baron Blood (1972), which is of the type heard in many films of the ‘60s and’70s, with strings and vibraphone building a ‘dreamy’ atmosphere. Despite the music being composed for a different film, it melds with the Lumière creating a kind of reverie as the girls shuffle back and forth on their base with one of them (perhaps aware of the camera?) performing a half-hearted ballet step. Music and image combine, and yet the sound is not sublimated, for we remain aware the two are quite distinct and can perceive the affect the music is having. Finally, a minor chord sounds, and as if on cue, one of the girls runs out of frame. As when voice and image correspond in Belisha Code and Square Dance, the motion creates on-screen adhesion, pulling the viewer from the reverie and into the frame just as the girl exits, and the screen goes black. Having briefly tied us into the picture, the music then directs our attention out of the frame, and to what possibly lies beyond it.

The Portsmouth Sinfonia’s somewhat atonal version of the Dance of the SugarPlum Fairy (1973) is matched in Nutcracking to a shot of three workmen engaged in repairs to a house on a street in Poland, whilst members of the public walk past. The music creates flashes of adhesion with both the workmen and passers-by. Firstly, the rhythm from the bowed strings corresponds with the motion of the first pedestrian to cross from right to left (in a way not dissimilar to the counting in Square Dance), before the xylophone plays, and our attention turns to one of the workmen all but tapping in time with a small hammer on a tile by a door. We know that he can’t be playing the tune, or even miming to it, indeed he has been tapping all along, and yet we are drawn to the adhesion. The music builds, with a mournful brass section creating a comedic undertow as an old lady enters the frame from the left, pauses for a moment as if awaiting her cue, and then lugubriously traverses the frame, pulling a shopping trolley behind her. 

A nighttime scene outside the Glasgow School of Art is the source of the footage for Goings On. Nothing in particular happens:a car drives up the hill, two men walk past from different directions, and a figure on the right of the screen, who is initially in shadow, steps out from the darkness and rubs his hands. This no doubt innocent activity is infused by the guitar music of Glenn Branca’s The Spectacular Commodity (1981) adding menace and creating dramatic tension where none previously existed. The man in shadow begins to look suspicious: what or who is he waiting for, why is he there? Is the car on the way to a drug drop? Sound and image bind together in a way that seductively reveals the manipulation brought about by the music’s filling of the image. Had the scene been acted, part of a longer drama, we may well have been seduced into the director’s narrative world, but here we can feel our emotions being played with, demonstrating how the unscripted can so quickly and easily become ‘cinematic’ with the addition of a few chords. 

Conclusion

There were 44 Lumière et Son pieces of which today we have seen a few short extracts, all the videos are still available on the Lumière et Son blog and a few have had another life as part of the Kerry Baldry curated One Minute Programme. Focusing on the small scale, the ephemeral, the what might otherwise be unnoticed, the collection forms an alternativedepiction of the modern city in contrast to the dynamics of the city symphony. 

Bibliography

Eisenstein, S. M., Pudovkin, V. I., and Aleksandrov, G. V., 1928. A Statement. In: E. Weisand J. Belton (eds). 1985.  Film Sound: Theory and Practice.New York: Columbia University Press.

Gidal, P., 1989. Materialist Film. London: Routledge.

Hamlyn, N., 2003. Film Art Phenomena. London: BFI.

Szpakowski, M., 2012. Lumière and Son – A Discussion, a Selective Commentary & Some Remarks. Furtherfield.
[Accessed 10^thJan 2016].

Filmography

Antonioni, M. Blow Up(1966)

Brava, M. Baron Blood (1972)

Lumière Brothers. La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895)

Marker, C. La Jetée (1962)

Smith, J.The Girl Chewing Gum(1976) 

Reggio, G.Koyaanisqatsi(1982)

Ruttman, w. Berlin Symphony of a Metropolis (1927)

Vertov, D. Man with the Movie Camera (1929) 

Lumière et Son, videos by Philip Sanderson and Thomas Wiesner available at http://Lumière-et-son.blogspot.co.uk. The following videos were shown at the colloquium.

Belisha Code (2010)

Goings On(2010)

Letterboxing (2009)

Nutcracking (2010)                

Spring Greens (2010)               

Square Dance(2010)               

  

On One of These Bends - Sound Projector review

Rounding off the reviews of the On One of These Bends LP (it came out almost a year ago) is Bright Sparks from Ed Pinsent at the Sound Projector magazine. Well worth waiting for...

...These Bends mostly comprises short and mysterious instrumentals, songs, and structured arrangements that any professional film scoring person should marvel at. The press notes here liken this music to Nino Rota and Henry Mancini, but might I also suggest John Carpenter’s 1980s soundtracks and, at times, the sheer audacity and cheek of Morricone at his finest is also evoked. A bold claim perhaps, but Sanderson is executing some bold music coups here. So far I’ve got a mental checklist that starts with “the best lost Library LP ever” and includes Eno, the Radiophonic Workshop, Cold Wave, and Cluster along the way. Though it’s an elusive, subjective thing, I say that Sanderson does the “Radiophonic thing” far better than any of the recent imitators (Ghost Box, A Year In The Country) and does it without even needing to exert himself...

Read the whole review here.

On One of These Bends - Vital Weekly Review

Nice review in the latest edition of Vital Weekly of the On One of These Bends LP.

Without having read the cover notes I started playing this record and it opened with a very familiar tune. 'Bright Waves' it is called and I heard it years and years ago on one of my favourite compilation LPs, 'Perspectives And Distortion', as released by Cherry Red Records. In them days that label released some of the best alternative pop and beyond music (think Five Or Six or A Tent), unlike these days when they churn out re-heated dishes of post-punk music that you all used have got rid off and now ‘need’ to buy again (I am not a fan to those compilations; I wish Cherry Red did proper CDs of their own history, like a box of everything by Five Or Six). Anyway, 'Bright Waves', was the opening piece back then, credited to Claire Thomas & Susan Vezey, but now we know it is by Philip Sanderson, erstwhile of Storm Bugs and vocals by Nancy Slessenger. Storm Bugs, Sanderson's previous musical project, used crude tape loops and electronics, but occasionally sounded like a great moody pop band, such as on their 7" for l'Invitation Au Suicide. Following that, Sanderson got more involved in doing soundtracks for experimental films and this LP compiles several of those soundtracks. Sanderson explores electronic music here, but moving away from the noise end of the music of that time, and wanders into something that is more mellow and pop like. He experiments with various female vocalists, who add a sort of jazzy style, but there is also spoken word and humming without words. As I noted last week, without the (moving) images it is not always easy to judge the music proper, but as it is released without the images, the composer is confident enough to let the music speak for itself, and quite rightly so. There is an abundance of beauty in these pieces, as well as variation. Guitars are gently strummed, echo is in place where necessary, and so is the reverb unit and throughout Sanderson plays the vibraphone on a bunch of pieces, even when at times a bit processed. This is exactly the kind of experimental 'pop' (for the lack of a better word) that I liked as a young man and that attracted me to such labels as Cherry Red (and Glass Records, to mention another, more forgotten one); that delicate balance between experiment and something that is a 'tune'. A record like this would not have gone amiss in their 1982 catalogue, I would think. But now it's 2019 and I am very happy to see it's release and it begs the question: is there more like this and when can we hear that? 
Frans de Waard, Vital weekly, number 1177, week 14 (April 2019)

On One of These Bends Wire Review

In the February issue of the Wire magazine there is a nice review of On One of These Bends by Emily Bick.

On One of These Bends

In December On One of These Bends a new LP on Séance Centre (a label run by Brandon Hocura) will be released. The LP pulls together for the first time a number of recordings made during the 1980s mostly intended for the soundtracks of various short experimental film & video projects. 

By 1981 the first wave of DIY cassette culture was winding down; the weekly music papers Sounds and the NME stopped their columns listing tape releases and though cassettes continued to be put out it quickly became more of an underground movement focussing on noise music. It had been four years since Snatch Tapes had had its first cassette release and with the simple arrogance that comes with youth I felt that Storm Bugs had done the DIY noise thing. It was time for a change.

Arguably the first seeds of a different approach had been the Bright Waves track credited to the fictitious duo Claire Thomas & Susan Vezey and released on the 1980 Reprint cassette and then on the Cherry Red Perspectives and Distortion LP.  Reworking through a Revox tape delay system a few choral phrases sung by Nancy Slessenger at the Paddington Snatch Tapes HQ, Bright Waves is a floating wall of breathless vocal sound that threatens to fall apart at any moment. The track was part homage, part pastiche of sections of Eno’s Music for Airports; the title intended as an irreverent nod to how ambient can so easily become easy listening. 

This element of pastiche was to be developed in the music recorded from 1981 onwards. Fellow Storm Bug Steven Ball was studying Film Video and Sound at Maidstone College of Art and through him I met another student Michael Denton. Having heard that I had some facility with sound he asked for help recording music for his videos. Visually and sonically the frame of reference was less photocopied black and white grainy industrial, and more 1950s jazz LPs with their use of vibraphones and bright block colour sleeves.  

Both the Goldsmiths and the West Square electronic music studios I used had alongside their VCS3 synthesizers and tape machine set-ups vibraphones. Quite why they had vibes was unclear as nobody ever seemed to play them, but nonetheless once plugged in the motors started whirring and out came that classic tremolo tinkling, a sound like shimmering glass. In the summer of 1981 Michael and I recorded Viewfinder, which combines an analogue 32 step sequencer driven VCS3 pattern with a simple vibes part and clipped guitar rhythm, somewhere between Storm Bugs and cocktail music. The authenticity of the industrial mixed with a dollop of pastiche.

I began recording some new songs at West Square. The lyrics referenced a tongue in cheek celebration of 1950s jet set life style “mixing drinks and aeroplanes”, open top car drives in the Alps and “khaki trips to Egypt”, all somewhat at odds with a life of grime on the dole in South London.  By 1982 I had worked up about four songs in this vein but my own voice seemed ill suited to the new material. A frequent visitor to West Square was a young American woman called Naomi. One day I asked her if she could sing and indeed she could, and so she was quickly drafted in to record the tracks, lending them a quality somewhere between Streisand and the Shangri-Las. The studio was in an old school building outside of which was a playground, and in the quieter passages in Love in a Cold Climate you can hear the playtime primary school laughter.

I spent some time trying to promote these new numbers, even wangling an audience with the head of A & R at EMI. I had sold him the project over the phone on the basis that it was a cross between Kraftwerk and ABBA, which of course it wasn’t. The interview lasted a few minutes before he began fast forwarding the tape to the next track commenting nicely, if disapproving that it sounded like the more experimental end of Kate Bush’s output (Bush was on EMI at the time). Fifteen minutes later I was back on the street with my cassette. I tried with other labels including Rough Trade where Geoff Travis kindly listened to the whole tape on headphones in front of me, but politely said no.  My svengali impresario career seemingly not making much progress I put the reel to reel tapes in the cupboard and moved on to the next project. 

Michael Denton had received a small film development grant from the Arts Council and was working on a short 16MM film to be shot in around Dungeness, a bleak windswept part of the south coast occupied by small shacks, a lighthouse, narrow gauge railway and oh a nuclear power station. The area has subsequently become rather fashionable, a development triggered partly by the filmmaker Derek Jarman buying a cottage there in 1986, and then planting a garden and making a film shot in and around the cottage.  Watertight as Michael’s film was called preceded Jarman’s move by a year or so. He asked me to record some music for the film. By this point I was using a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland SH101 and put together a number of variations on a simple musical sequence. As with all the film music I recorded there was more than a nod to Laurie Johnson (who had composed the Avengers theme and incidental music), John Barry, and of course Ennio Morricone and François de Roubaix. There was over 30 minutes of ‘cues’ and this spawned the main theme Watertight to be found on the LP as well as Everything He is Not.

We are now in the mid 1980s and a former Maidstone student Andrew Fitzpatrick who was working on a project with funding from Eastern Arts commissioned some soundtrack music for his video Tale Chase loosely concerned with assignations in a Paris park and a French poodle.  I recorded the tracks at IPS studios in Shepherd’s Bush, one of the few studios in London where the engineer would not blink if you said you wanted to record a bowed hubcap and a bag of nails, indeed Organum and many other similar luminaries worked there. It was around £25 per hour which whilst cheap for studios at the time focussed the brain. Armed with an old acoustic guitar I recorded three or four pieces using the studio’s digital reverb and primitive sampling to the full. The result was E For Echo, and Echo Complex (both on the LP). The tracks were made without first seeing the moving images, and though Andrew declared himself very happy with the results they clearly didn’t fit the pacing of the video and so an outake from the Watertight sessions was reworked and found to match much better.

Meanwhile Steven Ball and I had been discussing making a film together based on a story much heard in the Medway towns (where we had spent our teens) of repeated ghost sightings of a hitchhiker on Blue Bell Hill in Rochester. The legend went that following a car crash in 1965 that motorists travelling alone up the hill at night would see a woman hitching at the side of the road. The drivers would stop and offer her a lift. The woman would insist on sitting in the back of the car, but as they neared the bottom of the hill the drivers would turn round only to find that the woman had disappeared. The area around the hill is the location for Neolithic burial sites and is criss-crossed by ley lines. A somewhat complex scenario was worked up, a trilogy no less of short pieces which involved not only the ghost sightings, but also a journey across nearby Cliffe Marshes by the ‘ghost’ played by Angela Staples. The approach was to treat the landscape as a kind of shifting palimpsest on which the memory of events that had taken place were in some way recorded, and which could be subsequently activated or played back. 

With funding from South East Arts we embarked on part one of the trilogy Green on TheHorizon. I had a very simple melody picked out on an acoustic guitar, which can be heard about 9 minutes and 30 seconds in on the Storm Bugs LP Up The Middleand Down The Sides. We went into Creekside studios in Deptford and using whatever keyboards they had on offer recorded variations on the theme. Mixed with the voices of Tony Raven and Patricia Hosking plus a drone from an IPS session this forms the basis for the opening theme This is Not a Game. “This is not a game or a competition there are no prizes to be won times to be beaten or rules to follow, you are on your own”.

Following the completion of Green on The Horizon Steven slightly unexpectedly moved to Australia, no reflection on the film, which was well received, touring extensively as part of the Electric Eyes programme. I embarked on the second part of the trilogy Hangway Turning, again with funding from South East Arts. This time the film featured not only the ghost but a psychic investigator called Thomas Cubitt played by Alien Brain Nigel Jacklin. The West Square studio was now located next to Morley College and had acquired new digital equipment including a Yamaha soundbank synthesizer. In an afternoon session a few basic tracks were recorded using the soundbank fed through a VCS3 for added reverb and ring modulation treatments. Three of these pieces from the session, namely Scene of the Crash, Looking Back, and the title track On One of These Bends are included on the new LP.  

There was still part three of the trilogy to complete, though it had never really been established what exactly that might entail, and the project morphed into Shadowman. This coincided with a move to run down flat in New Eltham, a somewhat nothing place on the very fringes of London (you could literally walk down the dual carriageway past the sign that said you are now entering Kent). Feeling somewhat exiled from everything, Shadowman has the filmmaker’s shadow as the only character. The E for Echo vocal loop features as the main music in the film.

Shadowman completed in 1991 was to be the last single screen piece I was to make for ten years, spending the 1990s working on sound and light installations.  Listening back to the two sides of the LP without the moving images its nostalgic musical sequences and feeling of displacement and loss turns it into something of a memento mori for the films, and maybe the decade itself.  

Typing Pool

 

Using an old OS9 application called Videodelic, Keyboard Skills reworks footage from a WW2 information film on the correct way to type and the importance of proper typing to the war effort. The soundtrack is a combination of asynchronous typing sounds and a riff (pun intended) on Scott Joplin.

Pebble Dot Dash

Pebble Dot Dash by Philip Sanderson combines flâneur footage with shortwave radio recordings. The camera takes a series of walks on and off the beaten track around the coastal town of Hastings. Time slips elliptically by as movements there and back are merged electronically; the train arriving whilst departing, the tide going in as it goes out, a man shadowing his own footsteps.

The moving images are married with shortwave transmissions from across the globe, captured during filming. These broadcasts from China, Pakistan, Russia, the USA, and elsewhere, reflect contemporary neo-liberal anxieties; deals and scams, the financing of the second coming, aspiration and desire. Sound and image mesh asynchronously, global audio relocating the here to there.

Now being previewed by the good people at the Wire 

Boule de Neige

For the first week in March 2018 the UK was thick with snow. The combination of white outside and sharp periodontal twangs inside, prompted the recording of a somewhat old school 16 minute electronic track called 'Boule de Neige'. The piece was made using a homebrew Max/MSP/Jitter Synthi, but rather than the usual Sanderson/Storm Bugs clattering sequences you get a free-form improvisation. The main patches uses a variation on the no-input circuit much beloved of David Tudor. Here a touch of white noise seeds a feedback loop that moves between modulated hi and lo pass filters, giving one the sharp dynamics of a sound on the edge of break-up, not far removed from a bowed hubcap or squeaky gate. The overall feeling of 'Boule de Neige' is very akin to a couple of the live sessions I played with Nigel Jacklin and the Rupenus Brothers back in the early 1980s, hence the subtitle (Alien Brains for Breakfast).

Having uploaded 'Boule de Neige' to Bandcamp, four more recent tracks were added to make up a full long player. 'Factory Settings' features the soft Synthi/VCS3 again, but with a sequencer and delay line for self-pollinating cross rhythms. 'Window Walk' is an instrumental version of the track included on the 2017 Linear Obsession Christmas compilation A View from a Hill. The track began life as a visual sequence of shifting squares, which were then translated into their audio equivilent by Artmatic. 'We Thought it Would be OK but the Wind Changed' was originally credited to Maids of the Marsh and included on the M - The Thirteenth Letter ‎CD Compilation assembled by Daniel Blumin for WFMU in 2013. The children's voices come from a 1970s public safety film highlighting the potential dangerous combination of high voltage power lines and kites. The music is a nod to children's TV programmes from the same decade such as, The Owl Service, and Children of the Stones. Lastly 'Broken Morning' is an inversion of the spirit if not the music of the popular Christian song 'Morning has Broken'. Instead of chiming guitars and angelic voices celebrating the new day, one gets more of a granular synthesis lament, with yodeling and a percussion loop. Oh and the drawing was made during a workshop on REF impact statements!

The Mourning of Mark E Smith

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Somewhat bemused by all the MES obituaries, partly as one suspects the man himself would have found it all too fawning, but also because I doubt many who claim to care so much can name any of last 10 Fall LPs. Not that I can, this isn’t a “I’m a real fan and own the grief” routine, but rather the social media outpourings suggests that MES represented far more than his music, which high points such as Elastic Man aside was intensely repetitive. Yes saint John Peel thought the Fall were the bees knees, and there are many amusing (as long as you were not on the receiving end) tales about him firing band members at service stations, or pouring beer over a coach driver’s head as they hurtled along at top speed. The appeal of all this is the notion that MES never sold out, he was the keeper of the post-punk flame, he just kept on, drinking, playing live, making an album a year, firing band members, getting hitched up with new ones (and wives), drinking, getting into fights, playing live, firing and hiring band members, and so on. This drum pattern of a life is it seems intensely appealing to many a middle class male soul. I was surprised when separately a couple of people I knew admitted to being not just Fall fans but having been for a while some British version of Dead Heads. They had in their early twenties after university (of course) not just attended the odd Fall gig, but followed the band round for whole tours, sleeping rough and hitching, begging and stealing, whatever it took to get to the next gig.  This went on for months at a time and then one day this post college right of passage over they progressed on to proper jobs. Whatever dues they then paid in the coming years selling out to the man and the mortgage company, compromising on their once held beliefs, they had at least in some way ‘lived the dream’ and could sleep sound at night in the knowledge that MES was keeping the flame alive, drinking, playing live, making an album a year, firing band members, getting hitched etc, etc.

What a nightmare. To imagine that not deviating from the same riffs and barroom taps for all those years is an achievement, something to be applauded is to misunderstand both the misery of the alcoholic and the mind numbing tedium and lack of imagination in repetition. After thousands of gigs any soul not steeped in drink would cry out to do something different. Even ABBA were insightful enough to sing “All I do is eat and sleep and sing. Wishing every show was the last show”. Turning MES into an updated whisky priest feeds into the dubious concept of there being authenticity in grinding yourself into an early grave, of some goodfella blokey truth in getting plastered night after night. Believe if you like that MES lived the dream/nightmare so you didn’t have to, but I will mourn instead for all the things he could have done.         

George Smiley at Snatch Tapes HQ

It is 1981 and George Smiley (AKA Alec Guinness in the BBC version of the Le Carré novel)visits the Snatch Tapes HQ which was at 25 Westbourne Terrace. Of course we had moved out the year before so he is unlucky in his attempt at securing a copy of Snatch 3. Looking like it was shot on 16mm what is interesting is that unlike a big budget film production in which the street would have been closed off and the passers by and cars would all be extras, this was filmed in the everyday hubbub of the street with 'real' people and cars. https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/956456702844526592

Quick Quick Quick

If by chance you should find yourself at the London Art Fair this week then wend your way through to the screening room at the back of the Art Projects space to see a programme entitled Quick, Quick, Quick curated by Pryle Behrman this contains both a fine selection from volumes 1-9 of Kerry Baldry's One Minute programme and a collection of half a dozen or so Lumiere et Son pieces. Here is one of them…

Border Crossing - Merry Christmas

Christmas felicitations to all.

Resisting immersion in Visual Music, Greenwich Sound/Image Colloquium

Transcript of a presentation given at the 2017 Sound/Image Colloquium at Greenwich University.

Resisting immersion in Visual Music: the case for heightened listening and looking and against pseudo-synaesthesia

The quest for a synaesthetic melding of the senses, for the revelation of an underlying correlation between sound and image has underpinned the development of visual music, from Aristotle’s Music of The Spheres, through Castel’s Ocular Harpsichord, to twentieth century advocates such as Whitney (1980, pp 40-44) who sought  “to discover their laws of harmonic relationships”. In contemporary visual music practice the term immersive is increasingly being used, denoting an all-enveloping synaesthetic experience, be it more populist examples such as Bjork’s foray into VR, or installations at Ars Electronica. The impetus for immersion comes from a number of directions, including developments in digital technology, and a renewed desire for a symbiotic relationship between science and the arts; Miller’s (2014) Colliding Worlds.

Whilst the case for an absolute correspondence between colour and harmony has been repeatedly debunked, not least by practitioners themselves – see Le Grice’s (2001, pp?) mathematical reasoning why such a correspondence is fanciful, the terms synaesthetic and especially immersive continue to be used, with little interrogation of whether a blurring of sensory boundaries or an enveloping of the audience is a positive step forward. This paper argues that instead of synaesthetic immersion, what should be encouraged is a heightened state of looking/listening brought about by a reflexive engagement between the work and the audience. Three methods for potentially achieving such a heightened sate are proposed each employing a form of arbitrary function.  In each case a short one-minute extract from my own practice will be used as a brief illustration.

To argue that there is no absolute sound/image or tone/colour correspondence is not to suggest that there is no propensity to make such correlations, but rather it is to locate the adhesion of sound and image in the minds of the audience as they engage with a piece. Adhesion was first identified by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov, in their Statement on Sound of 1928, when they noted that marrying sound with moving image could all too easily produce the “‘illusion’ of talking people, of audible objects, etc.”. The Russian filmmakers response to illusionist adhesion was asynchronism, a technique employed and nuanced by both Eisenstein and Pudovkin in subsequent writings and films. In neither case should asynchronism be viewed as meaning in some way out of sync. For Eisenstein the term became increasingly to mean a form of quasi-musical counterpointing, whilst for Pudovkin (1929) a looser connection is advocated in which occasional moments of adhesion form part of an asynchronous push-pull rhythm, with the audience drawn in and out of the frame, visually and sonically. Pudovkin then utilises the propensity for adhesion as part of a strategy that creates a productive tension and interplay between the senses.

Asynchronism was adopted by a number of filmmakers such as Cavalcanti in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast in visual music adhesion was often actively sought. For example the prologue to Fischinger’s Optical Poem (1938), states:

To most of us, music suggests definite mental images of form and colour. The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment. Its object is to convey these mental images in visual form. (Fischinger, 1938)

Here it is not just adhesion that is desired but something more, an equation between musical and visual forms, the synaesthetic and seeing sound, hearing colour equation. One might ask if there is a visual music equivalent of asynchronism that can be applied to offset this for of illusionism? An examination of various visual music pieces suggest a number of strategies, which broadly down into three methods.

The first method is close to Pudovkin’s asynchronism in that it uses momentary adhesion. Examples of this approach can be seen in the films of Lye and Le Grice in which the moving images are not synchronised note for note with the soundtrack music, but married to syncopated musical rhythms. In Lye’s Trade Tattoo (1937) it is Cuban dance music, whilst in Le Grice’s Berlin Horse (1970) the looping imagery is counterpointed by Eno's phasing piano loops.  In both cases sound and image work together, but retain their identity, there is no beat-by-beat or 4/4 dynamics, cementing the audio-visual relationship, but rather flashes of momentary adhesion, occur simultaneously, at different tempi and at different locations within the frame. This open-ended and shifting correspondence has a dynamic and yet arbitrary quality, arbitrary not as in random, but in the sense that adhesions are being actively made and broken by each member of the audience, independently and somewhat differently at the moment of audition. In my own piece Landfill (2008), an animated morphing topography is married with a soundtrack of treated yodelling a form of early sonar. There are no designated points of correspondence, but rather a series of arbitrary adhesions.

Landfill (2008) from Philip Sanderson on Vimeo.

To look at further possible implementations of the arbitrary let us examine optical sound films made at the London Filmmakers Co-operative in the 1970s by two filmmakers, Sherwin and Rhodes. Optical sound films rely on what Sherwin calls “an accident of technological synaesthesia”, namely that when the images on an optical film soundtrack are the same as those in the main projected frame, one in effect has a means of both transforming images into sound and of their simultaneous synchronised reproduction, (Sherwin & Hegarty 2007, pp 5).

Sherwin made a number of optical sound films in which the images were also printed on the optical track including Musical Stairs (1977), and Railings (1977). The sounds produced by this process are in sync with the images but are not those which would be made had the railings or stairs been recorded with a microphone.  In Musical Stairs it is the panning of the camera up and down a flight of metal stairs, which when those images pass over the optical head produces a musical scale, whilst in Railings, by filming the ironwork from different angles, a sequence of electronic pulses are generated (Hamlyn, 2005). Sherwin’s pieces counter the illusion of sound and image correspondence by in part employing the adhesive tendency against itself, sound and image stick, but in a way, which forces the audience to question causality rather than accept it. It is the movement of the filmic representation that generates the audio not the represented object.

This second arbitrary function can be applied to either abstract or representational imagery, upsetting the expected dynamics of causal relationships. Whilst optical sound offers plentiful scope for experimentation digital technology allows one to expand and develop the arbitrary function. As an example lets look at Moth Flight (2016) made to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of the death of Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly from Britain to Australia in her Puss Moth plane. Here the audience is encouraged to ask, is the ‘action’ producing the sound, or is the movement of the image in some way generating the sound or…

Moth Flight (2016) from Philip Sanderson on Vimeo.

The third arbitrary function is best illuminated by Rhodes optical sound film entitled Light Music (1975-77), in which she printed a series of horizontal black lines on both the optical track and film frame. By varying the thickness of the lines, the pitch of the sound rises and falls in sync with the projected light patterns. (Hamlyn, 2011, pp 215). In an interview at the time of the piece’s exhibition at Tate Modern in 2012, Rhodes stated “what you see is what you hear”, a sentence which invokes both the basic synaesthetic equation.

Curiously rather than demonstrating literal equation, Light Music suggests a further arbitrary function.  Two types of optical track were routinely employed, the bilateral variable-area method (consisting of wavy curvaceous lines) and the variable density method, the straight lines used in Light Music. Both methods produce the exact same sound, but if Light Music had employed the bilateral method the projected image would have had a very different appearance.  Nonetheless, we would have still perceived correspondence and made equation. One might go so far as to conjecture that if the optical track, and the projected image had not been identical, but been some other visual form that reciprocally changed as the sound did, a similar connection would still be made. The third arbitrary function requires a foregrounding of the arbitrary nature of the correspondence. Digital mapping offers the possibility to create just such self-declared reciprocal sound and image changes.

An early example of this reciprocal mapping is Le Grice’s computer piece Arbitrary Logic (1988), in which the same data is used the to produce both the on-screen colour fields, and via MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) the sound. When Le Grice was making Arbitrary Logic, digital technology was in its infancy, and in his writings he speculates about the future possibilities of mapping (2001, pp 284). Such opportunities would become available some ten years later in software such as Max/MSP/Jitter (Cycling 74) in which digital MIDI data can be used to control audio parameters such as pitch, velocity, volume, envelope, whilst simultaneously being mapped to visual manipulations such as: rotation, zoom, hue, video feedback, and so on.

Thus the tendency towards literalness can be offset by varying the parametric relationship; for example if in one section of a work as the frequency rises the hue changes, this can be offset elsewhere, by mapping pitch to changes in form, or another visual element. By such strategies, the arbitrary nature of the audio-visual correlation is foregrounded, as the audience is encouraged to make first one equation and then another. Here is Quadrangle, an early example made back in 2005  in which a patch was built in Max/MSP to generate quasi-random trills, and staccato bursts of data. This information was then mapped to control both the animation of a white square, and via MIDI, a synthesizer. As the music starts and stops, so the square performs a spatial choreography: changing colour, moving across the frame, advancing and retreating, etc. The arbitrary element is introduced by keeping the sound parameters constant throughout, whilst the visual mapping parameters are changed.

Quadrangle (2005) from Philip Sanderson on Vimeo.

Synaesthesia has both underpinned and arguably thwarted the development of visual music practice. This paper started from the position that recent tendencies towards immersion have exacerbated many of the negative aspects of the genre and that this can only be countered by a continual reflexive interrogation of the audio-visual relationship. Three arbitrary functions designed to introduce just such a reflexive tension at the moment of audition were outlined. Key to all three is the recognition of the propensity on the part of the audiences for making causal audio-visual equations, but rather than use this to encourage immersive synaesthesia this desire to adhere can be utilised as part of a range of strategies for denying equation, questioning causality and reflexive mapping that all contribute towards creating a heightened state of looking and listening.

--> ReferencesEisenstein, S. M., Pudovkin, V. I., and Aleksandrov, G. V., 1928. A Statement. In: E. Weis and J. Belton (eds). 1985.  Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hamlyn, N., 2003. Film Art Phenomena. London: BFI.
Hamlyn, N., 2011. Mutable screens: the expanded films of Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Steve Farrer and Nicky Hamlyn. In: A.L. Rees, D.Curtis, S.Ball, D, White (eds) 2011. Expanded cinema: art, performance, film. Tate Publishing, London, pp 212-220.
Le Grice, M., 2001. Experimental cinema in the digital age. London: British Film Institute.
Miller, A.I., 2014. Colliding worlds: how cutting-edge science is redefining contemporary art. London: WW Norton & Company.
Pudovkin, V. I., 1929. Asynchronsim as a Principle of Sound Film. In: E. Weis and J. Belton (eds). 1985.  Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sherwin, Guy K. and Hegarty, Sebastiane (2007), Optical Sound Films 1971 – 2007, DVD, London: Lux.
Whitney, J., 1980. Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art.  Peterborough New Hampshire: Byte Books/McGraw-Hill.

Film of The Same Name

Watch the Film of The Same Name Here