(Disclaimer: my maxpatches look horrible but they work).

This is fair to middling technical but I've made it as straightforward as I can.

The first image below shows one of four stereo tracks for the 8-channel Particulate Articulator that I've been writing about. The other three tracks are almost duplicates (I left them out for clarity) except that tracks 2 and 4 have a tape delay option (with sliders that I can assign to a small korg controller) cobbled together from patches I found online. I don't use the tape delay much except occasionally for radio works because too much delay is a bit obvious for my tastes. Besides I'm using good quality outboard pedal effects and  I have also have Revox that does tape delay properly. The patch looks just about acceptable in the picture but all four tracks together is a bird's nest.

Some of the text in the objects I don't understand. The text is either there as part of Max's functions or I put it there and can't remember why. The stray text is pure indolence on my behalf.  Basically I don't want to change anything I don't understand because the patch works and because I know how to change values for the bits I want to tweak. Maybe I should learn how to streamline the patch. Below you'll find the presentation view which is quite tidy. Maybe this is how it goes - messy under the hood and a slick looking superstructure.

I begin by loading in folders of sounds to each of the four tracks. At the moment, for my new label and for live work, I'm working with eight sounds per folder because I think things start to sound tight with a restricted group of sounds (as in my compositions). These folders can be changed on the fly. Various random metronomes decide when the files are selected so nothing changes regularly. The looper module chops up the audio files into different sizes, starting and finishing in different places. Because of the way I've set it up nothing comes out sounding like a looper's been at it. I also have a time-stretcher object (which stretches between two values, randomised, both up and down), though I've begun setting this to operate between values close to 1.0 because I'm happy with the work on the files beforehand and also anything with vocal sounds or certain instruments sounds odd. The timestretcher worked very well in some radio pieces I made in the past. There are other objects that I put in there to try to stop clicks resulting from the constant chopping and changing that goes on. I've forgotten how they work. I think they help a bit but not totally so if anyone knows how to create a tiny fade in/out once the files come out of the looper object I'd be grateful for tips.

I should point out that I have different patches for 1'  2', 3' and 5' files. I also modified patches for combinations, eg I can have a patch with tracks et to: 1', 2', 2' 5'. Why? Because the 1' files are more gestural and more rapidly articulated than the 5' files which tend to be more textural, both in the kinds of sounds I've selected and the way they play longer. Each patch has started to develop a unique 'character' that I'm still learning to work with.

The eight channels (four stereo channels) are fed from computer to an RME Fireface, then to the desk where I mix live and add outboard effects on the two auxiliaries.

Although I took some time to learn Max from scratch and to eventually design and build this digital instrument (I'll come to the 'why'  in the third and final blog post), the hard work went in over years, decades even. Everything I've ever learned and understood about sound and music, about composition, has gone into this ostensibly simple task of chopping up recordings into different lengths. Tailoring the sounds that go into the folders, cataloguing, establishing taxonomies, working out what sound goes with what - this has been the hard work. I'd suggest that this instrument  replicates my compositional preferences to some degree.

Whatever the snotterati might think of laptop performance this is a versatile, expressive and flexible musical instrument, as much of an instrument as all the zithers and marimbas I've ever made in the past. It can be used as a studio instrument or played live where there's enough to keep me sweating for a full set. Book me and I'll show you. Or visit my tape label when it's up and running.

Finally I'd love to collaborate with other musicians. Either to record individuals and ensembles as they rehearse or experiment or to invite artists to send me their own audio files, tailored to one or other of the different lengths I use in the folders. Look out for news on this.

​Thanks for reading.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from James Tugwell, Record Label Liaison of the British Library Sound Archive. He invited me to donate my compositions to be catalogued,  archived & preserved as part of the nation's audio & cultural heritage. The music will be made available to anyone (writers, researchers etc.) holding a British Library readers pass at either the London site and the Yorkshire site in Boston Spa. Of course I was very happy to be able to contribute.

That's one thing. The other is actually accessing audiences, playing live music to people. I've spoken before about this problem, living rurally and remotely, out of the various loops, struggling to get on the circuit or connect with the various new music scenes and circuits, especially in the UK. A lot of this is social and I'm pretty much a lone wolf here in the Borders.

So any promoters out there, please have a listen to my work which is well documented on this site and if you think my music would appeal to your audiences give me a shout and I'll be happy to talk.

I don't know what it should be called. The names might fluctuate a little. There's a big back-story to this project. The Particulate Articulator is a software instrument written in Max. I won't assume that everyone reading this knows what Max is hence the link. For my purposes it's a virtual environment into which you drag and drop different objects with different behaviours then join them together with virtual cables to make synthesisers and other digital instruments. Others use it for video, managing complex multi-media environments and unheard-of geekeries beyond my ken.

The idea 'came to me' in strange circumstances of which I'll say more later. As some of you know I work with recorded sound. I record everything - natural environments, incidental sounds, objects, materials, instruments, electronic devices, hand-made gadgets - anything and everything that will serve a musical purpose. My compositional method is built around explorations into morphology (the shapes of sounds) dense textural layers and complexity. I've tried so many different ways of performing new music, for example the method of live mixing various streams of sound across several channels, changed on the fly, often performed to some kind of personal score. That works very well.  

Or gathering together interesting sound-making devices and electronic devices on a table (the 'car-boot sale' model) and improvising freely. That model works also very well and regularly serves hundreds of great musicians. But looking for something different and more specific it took me some time to realise that a new instrument had to be designed and built, extending the work I did in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was into just intonation and making my own versions of Harry Partch's diy orchestras out of metal, wood and glue.

Following the unexpected mysterious and 'you-won't-believe-me' insight into what needed doing I taught myself Max (badly) then designed and built the Articulate Particulator which in essence replicates many of my compositional preferences though in a more chopped up, randomised and therefore somewhat less predictable manner. The patch (the layout of the objects and cables on the page) is very messy and over-complicated. It looks like somebody's tipped a load of Max objects on the page then invited a child to mess it all up. A teenager could make it in five minutes using one tenth of the cables and objects. As a first-year University assignment it might scrape a D-minus. However (by one definition at least) it is a proper musical instrument and more importantly it actually does what I want. Next up I'll explain how it all works. Thanks for reading.
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(part 2)

Since composing Charivari, which by the way still needs a companion piece to make a publication, I've been sidetracked by lens-based activities. I really do find photography and experimental film-making compelling but have struggled to gather align these emerging practices with the ideas that drive my musical work. But eventually you find a way, an interest in form, environments, ecosystems, evolutionary complexity, layers of sound, layers of meaning, a properly scientific experimental mindset underpinned by a research-driven methodology. 

Photography led me (back) to landscape practice on the one hand and the world of objects and human culture on the other. Landscape practice, which in my case fundamentally involves a lot of time walking around local forests, rivers and moorlands, led me to a fresh appreciation of a strand of film-making, story telling and mood-setting that had always appealed to me but which I'd never pursued seriously. This being the eerie, the unsettled, the genre of folk horror, the tales of M.R. James and Nigel Kneale, old BBC ghost stories, the wyrd, deeper understandings of the complexities of the English landscape and rural culture in film and literature. I find contemporary understandings of English landscape fascinating and I'd love to share my reflections sometime on the perspectives of a new generation of film-makers. Closer to home, here in the Borders, I'm caught up in the tangled web of 'difficult' landscapes, the weight of human history, the historical ballads, patterns of land ownership and uses.  

It took me several years, ever-emerging, to understand the grammar(s) of film-making and of the kind of films I wanted to make. Throughout that time I rarely worked on sound design, arguably my strongest suite. I couldn't put imagery and sound together successfully (according to my definition) until I'd grasped the difficulties of shooting and editing moving imagery. Shooting films in forests on your own for example can be a messy business and there's no easy or logical way to establish a workflow (a useless word used mainly on YouTube instructional videos). I do have some background in understanding film sound, partly through a strand of my doctoral research where, broadly speaking, I examined possible parallels between film sound, photography and field recording. So here I am again working with recorded sound in both field and studio. The microphones and headphones are dusted off and it's almost time to start composing again. It would of course be wonderful to actually perform some music, but there is currently no local or regional platform for experimental music where I live and trying to break into the numerous cliques, cults and gatekeepers of the new music scene  is a thankless task. That needs some work.

Charivari (30:00) [2021/22] is a new composition as yet unpublished. Get in touch if it resonates with your label's aesthetic.

​You can listen to an excerpt here on Bandcamp.

If you want to dig a little deeper into the meaning and history of charivari I'd recommend the Wikipedia page which is well researched and accurate from what I can tell. But I want to write a little about the word and its meaning and why I chose it as a title for the composition so I'll draw freely from the Wikipedia article. Charivari took me about nine months to compose which is quite unusual, maybe even dreadful, in an era where many experimental musicians are turning out new work every other week. The piece began as one thing then became another. I unravelled an initial composition and started again. Such is the experimental method where you work patiently and without reward until the work grows a tiny leg, then an arm, then a head and so forth. I'm very pleased with the work and it represents where I'm at in my research and practice if I can put it like that.

Charivari was a European and North American folk custom in which a mock parade accompanied by raucous music barged its way through a community. Because the crowd aimed to make as much noise as possible using anything that came to hand these parades were often referred to as 'rough music'. There are many socio-political dimensions to these events which show interesting geographical variation .

The origin of the word charivari is likely from the Vulgar Latin caribaria, plural of caribarium, already referring to the custom of rattling kitchenware with an iron rod, itself probably from the Greek καρηβαρία (karēbara), literally "heaviness in the head" but also used to mean "headache", from κάρα "head" and βαρύς "heavy". You get the idea.

A common usage of the word today is in relation to circus performances, where a charivari opens the show with noise, tumbling clowns and other performers entering into the playing space. 

I'll write more on this in relation to the writings of Rabelais and Mikhail Bhaktin's Rabelais and his World, two authors who provided an important strand of my research.

I recently published Jericho as a digital download and before that I wrote three short articles on recorded sound and sympathetic magic.  I'm currently at the R&D phase of a new project for radio called Contagion. This will combine my interests in electroacoustic composition and photography, taking account of the ideas developed across the three Marcel Mauss articles in the form of spoken word layered with different sounds. 

The pandemic has forced many of us to dig deep in our respective practices. Some good work in different media is emerging from engagements with the domestic and other immediate environments. In Contagion I want to look at and listen to those objects in the domestic and personal environment which carry sympathetic resonance of the kind discussed in my articles on Mauss and magic. Listening will involve activating and energising objects of interest, paying attention to interior and exterior spaces and using recording technologies to reveal sounds beyond the everyday experience. This will be followed by a deep consideration of the musical potential of such sounds though this won't be a musical composition as such. Looking will require taking stock of the hundreds of possessions accumulated over years that we insist on hoarding for sentimental or even irrational reasons, then figuring out how to represent these as photographs, whether as still lifes or as elements in a documentary investigation. An (anarchic?) archive.
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