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HFF Vol. 1
| Label | Psyché Tropes – TROPES001 |
| Format | 3 x Vinyl, LP |
| Barcode | 5055300382740 |
| Country | UK & Europe |
| Released | 2014 |
| Genre | Electronic |
| Style | Noise, Drone, Abstract, Ambient, Experimental |
| A1 | – Sculpture | Compatibility Crystal Change | 3:26 |
| A2 | – Will Ward | Lanced | 3:39 |
| A3 | – Some Truths | Fire In A Field Of Molten Flowers | 5:42 |
| B1 | – Spatial | Every Good Story | 6:24 |
| B2 | – Scanner | Landing | 5:00 |
| C1 | – Tom White | Fracas | 4:59 |
| C2 | – Sally Golding | Ghost - Loud + Strong | 9:29 |
| D1 | – Merkaba Macabre | Mare Tranquilitatis | 4:32 |
| D2 | – Dave Draper | 77972 | 7:58 |
| D3 | – Mark Peter Wright | Ecstatic Electric | 4:42 |
| E1 | – Richard Pike | Vanitas | 4:30 |
| E2 | – Audio Dependent | Fritz | 7:19 |
| E3 | – Matthias Kispert | Austerity Rockers | 5:48 |
| F1 | – Aboutface | In The Tepid Shine We Breathe | 5:40 |
| F2 | – Synthetics | Traurige Filmmusik | 10:39 |
Artwork – Steven McInerney
180g triple vinyl LP with printed inner sleeves and 40 frame (12'') 16mm film strip.
Artwork and programme by Steven McInerney
Film services by Joao S. de Oliveira at Prestech Film Laboratories
Mastered and cut by Beau Thomas at Ten Eight Seven
All Rights Reserved. Psyché Tropes 2014
Sleeve / Notes
A film festival arrives at a station, crossplatforms and releases its own music. Absurd? Good. This release has been assembled not only to embrace such lateral mutations, but also to foster that process.
From its inception in 2010 Hackney Film Festival set out as a platform for a community of audio-visual artists living and working in the East London borough. Inscribed within the grooves of this vinyl convocation is a cherry-picked clutch of them. Now Vol. 1 is born and HFF evolves: a crucible of images that begets sounds – errant motile sounds whose blind wriggle detaches from the AV mother lode in search of a new synthesis. An audio-visual entity rendered temporarily blind (for it is always temporal). But visuality, like a phantom limb, can be enacted by the deeper pattern-forming structures of the brain when the sight organs are silenced and the auditory materialises – and this is often where the fun really starts: in the hermetic cavern where pictures dance. A black sun. Like the chimerical effects of flicker under closed lids.
Welcome to the inaugural release by Psychè Tropes, a label dedicated to exploring the synaesthetic intersections between sound and its visual counterpart. You hold in your hands an oil-based spiral groove etched with vibrations called forth by cinematic prerogatives. Secreted within the folds of this record’s sleeve you will find a tangible strip of 16mm film with combined optical soundtrack. This film strip is a suggestive random fragment of the visual component made for this release, whose indexical iconography has been shuffled and dealt to you, like some arcane tarot deck.
Like the cinematographic apparatus that would animate that Arcanum, the phonographic record has a physical body that must be mechanically propelled and probed to be called into being. The precision engineering that forged these tactile technologies is also the source of the entropic forces that cause it to decay in slow motion. This is the joyful melancholy of physical media, it delights in its own transience. So too with the warm buzzing and flapping made audible by dust and dirt on an optical film sound track when activated by a projector’s beam. Pulled helplessly on to its travelling cellulose membrane like a flytrap, the world’s detritus is rendered audible by a light pulse probing a printed graphic inscription.
In ‘Ghost – Loud + Strong’, Sally Golding deftly exploits precisely that flapping and buzzing embedded in the media that mutates, as it transmits from format to format, into recognisable sounds such as the swelling of a thunderstorm, layering in an impasto of noise. This is a sound artwork that began life as expanded cinema (its debut performance was at the 2012 Hackney Film Festival), yet its sonic textures originate from a found flexidisc inscribed with a voice narrating a woman’s past life regression, as it alternately emerges from and is obscured by the fog of multiple layers of reproduction.
Sally’s piece sits within the middle-disc sound art section of this collection, yet like a radio-telescope signal it howls across the empty space that separates these vinyl islands to its neighbouring planetary (sound) system, the first disc. There, Sally’s oblique crackle is pre-echoed by ‘Every Good Story’, Spatial’s insistent crackling hum, punctuated by twinkling moonbeam dew droplets; and by the static-charged chatter and skittering rumble of a wayward stylus in Scanner’s ‘Landing’, itself a symbiotic segue into the clicks and pops of Tom White’s microsonic dusty lunar crags, ‘Fracas’. In a dusty crater there, lies in wait the shadowy arachnoid Merkaba Macabre transmitting clusters of dissonant raw data spores like a nocturnal fungus from his ‘Mare Tranquillitatis’, whilst deep below him, in an underground grotto, Dave Draper’s slithy toves gyre and gimble in crazed avian exultation.
These mutative transmissions don’t just occur across tracks, however. Sometimes they are internal phenomena being literally driven inexorably along their own track by an ex-static volition, as in the wayward amplified strip lighting inside Mark Peter Wright’s ‘Ecstatic Electric’ train carriage, as it traces a journey from North London’s Stoke Newington to Liverpool Street in real time. Sculpture, initially a solo analogue electronic act, mutated into an audio-visual duo whose handmade visuals are actually animated picture discs that work according to the principles of a Victorian mechanical optical device. Yet this archaic technology is activated by hand-manipulated visible turntablism and channelled through a live video feed. Sculpture are here once more returned to their sightless origins as electronic music act; however, in ‘Compatibility Crystal Change’, the hypnotic looping loping afterimages persist – presaging the phantom faces formed from skeins of pitch-shifted aetheric moans entangled in Will Ward’s ‘Lanced’.
Vol. 1’s last testament is uttered by Synthetics’ ‘Traurige Filmmusik’, an avowedly rhythmic progressive electronica that might be an imaginary soundtrack probing the ambiguities of ecstasy and despair – its title referring to a sorrowful film score, in keeping with that joyful melancholy of the decaying of formats. Its suggestive evocation of an imaginary feature film echoes a subtlety lurking in Matthias Kispert’s ‘Austerity Rockers’, which almost resembles a lost funky soundtrack filtered through multiple veils of stylus crackle and hum until all that survives of it is the palaeolithic exoskeleton of its insistent pulse.
This collection is not only a sensory hybrid of audio borne out of the visual and of recording formats, it is also a hybrid of modes of sound generation, incorporating the electromagnetic, the modular, the optical and more. It is predominantly avowedly analogue, as with the acidic bass lines evident in Aboutface’s ‘In the tepid shine we breathe’, where the distant oneiric humanoid calls of a field recording in Hackney’s Springfield Park lurk beneath. Similarly, Richard Pike’s ‘Vanitas’ appears constructed as a twenty-first century memento-mori to format decay and analogue’s sunken wreckage, its dreamlike stuttering bass lines being perpetually under threat of flanged disintegration. Here is a Ballardian entropic future in which the detritus of archaic technology resurges in inverse proportion to the decline of civilisation. Analogue is branded in to the textures of this collection, yet paradoxically here are sounds at the cutting edge of technological innovation. Some Truths embodies this future-primitive tension that is always at the brink of disintegration, with his acid-drenched real-time modular recording, ‘Fire in a Field of Molten Flowers’. It’s a pre-echo of the also real-time-recorded (but conversely understated) haunting pulse and signal transmissions in the rarefied oceanic atmosphere of Audio Dependent’s ‘Fritz’.
While the unpredictable potentialities of analogue prevail as a sane response to a bleak, decayed future, throughout HFF Vol. 1 an inevitable symbiotic osmosis through the eye of the digital needle manifests. The visual component of this release was shot on physical 16mm film, but can be streamed in HD online, the chemistry of its optical grains enshrouded in a pixelated patina. We have digital’s empowering desktop cloning capability to thank for revealing to the world analogue’s beautiful bubblebath of imperfections – and the compelling paradoxes that occur when that hybrid produces a new synthesis. Welcome to the delightfully absurd mutation of Hackney Film Festival’s inaugural phono-graphic transmission. Languish in the mutant architectonics of its black sun, there’s more to come.
Stuart Heaney, the farside of Hackney Marshes, May 2014
Artwork and programme by Steven McInerney
Film services by Joao S. de Oliveira at Prestech Film Laboratories
Mastered and cut by Beau Thomas at Ten Eight Seven
All Rights Reserved. Psyché Tropes 2014
Sleeve / Notes
A film festival arrives at a station, crossplatforms and releases its own music. Absurd? Good. This release has been assembled not only to embrace such lateral mutations, but also to foster that process.
From its inception in 2010 Hackney Film Festival set out as a platform for a community of audio-visual artists living and working in the East London borough. Inscribed within the grooves of this vinyl convocation is a cherry-picked clutch of them. Now Vol. 1 is born and HFF evolves: a crucible of images that begets sounds – errant motile sounds whose blind wriggle detaches from the AV mother lode in search of a new synthesis. An audio-visual entity rendered temporarily blind (for it is always temporal). But visuality, like a phantom limb, can be enacted by the deeper pattern-forming structures of the brain when the sight organs are silenced and the auditory materialises – and this is often where the fun really starts: in the hermetic cavern where pictures dance. A black sun. Like the chimerical effects of flicker under closed lids.
Welcome to the inaugural release by Psychè Tropes, a label dedicated to exploring the synaesthetic intersections between sound and its visual counterpart. You hold in your hands an oil-based spiral groove etched with vibrations called forth by cinematic prerogatives. Secreted within the folds of this record’s sleeve you will find a tangible strip of 16mm film with combined optical soundtrack. This film strip is a suggestive random fragment of the visual component made for this release, whose indexical iconography has been shuffled and dealt to you, like some arcane tarot deck.
Like the cinematographic apparatus that would animate that Arcanum, the phonographic record has a physical body that must be mechanically propelled and probed to be called into being. The precision engineering that forged these tactile technologies is also the source of the entropic forces that cause it to decay in slow motion. This is the joyful melancholy of physical media, it delights in its own transience. So too with the warm buzzing and flapping made audible by dust and dirt on an optical film sound track when activated by a projector’s beam. Pulled helplessly on to its travelling cellulose membrane like a flytrap, the world’s detritus is rendered audible by a light pulse probing a printed graphic inscription.
In ‘Ghost – Loud + Strong’, Sally Golding deftly exploits precisely that flapping and buzzing embedded in the media that mutates, as it transmits from format to format, into recognisable sounds such as the swelling of a thunderstorm, layering in an impasto of noise. This is a sound artwork that began life as expanded cinema (its debut performance was at the 2012 Hackney Film Festival), yet its sonic textures originate from a found flexidisc inscribed with a voice narrating a woman’s past life regression, as it alternately emerges from and is obscured by the fog of multiple layers of reproduction.
Sally’s piece sits within the middle-disc sound art section of this collection, yet like a radio-telescope signal it howls across the empty space that separates these vinyl islands to its neighbouring planetary (sound) system, the first disc. There, Sally’s oblique crackle is pre-echoed by ‘Every Good Story’, Spatial’s insistent crackling hum, punctuated by twinkling moonbeam dew droplets; and by the static-charged chatter and skittering rumble of a wayward stylus in Scanner’s ‘Landing’, itself a symbiotic segue into the clicks and pops of Tom White’s microsonic dusty lunar crags, ‘Fracas’. In a dusty crater there, lies in wait the shadowy arachnoid Merkaba Macabre transmitting clusters of dissonant raw data spores like a nocturnal fungus from his ‘Mare Tranquillitatis’, whilst deep below him, in an underground grotto, Dave Draper’s slithy toves gyre and gimble in crazed avian exultation.
These mutative transmissions don’t just occur across tracks, however. Sometimes they are internal phenomena being literally driven inexorably along their own track by an ex-static volition, as in the wayward amplified strip lighting inside Mark Peter Wright’s ‘Ecstatic Electric’ train carriage, as it traces a journey from North London’s Stoke Newington to Liverpool Street in real time. Sculpture, initially a solo analogue electronic act, mutated into an audio-visual duo whose handmade visuals are actually animated picture discs that work according to the principles of a Victorian mechanical optical device. Yet this archaic technology is activated by hand-manipulated visible turntablism and channelled through a live video feed. Sculpture are here once more returned to their sightless origins as electronic music act; however, in ‘Compatibility Crystal Change’, the hypnotic looping loping afterimages persist – presaging the phantom faces formed from skeins of pitch-shifted aetheric moans entangled in Will Ward’s ‘Lanced’.
Vol. 1’s last testament is uttered by Synthetics’ ‘Traurige Filmmusik’, an avowedly rhythmic progressive electronica that might be an imaginary soundtrack probing the ambiguities of ecstasy and despair – its title referring to a sorrowful film score, in keeping with that joyful melancholy of the decaying of formats. Its suggestive evocation of an imaginary feature film echoes a subtlety lurking in Matthias Kispert’s ‘Austerity Rockers’, which almost resembles a lost funky soundtrack filtered through multiple veils of stylus crackle and hum until all that survives of it is the palaeolithic exoskeleton of its insistent pulse.
This collection is not only a sensory hybrid of audio borne out of the visual and of recording formats, it is also a hybrid of modes of sound generation, incorporating the electromagnetic, the modular, the optical and more. It is predominantly avowedly analogue, as with the acidic bass lines evident in Aboutface’s ‘In the tepid shine we breathe’, where the distant oneiric humanoid calls of a field recording in Hackney’s Springfield Park lurk beneath. Similarly, Richard Pike’s ‘Vanitas’ appears constructed as a twenty-first century memento-mori to format decay and analogue’s sunken wreckage, its dreamlike stuttering bass lines being perpetually under threat of flanged disintegration. Here is a Ballardian entropic future in which the detritus of archaic technology resurges in inverse proportion to the decline of civilisation. Analogue is branded in to the textures of this collection, yet paradoxically here are sounds at the cutting edge of technological innovation. Some Truths embodies this future-primitive tension that is always at the brink of disintegration, with his acid-drenched real-time modular recording, ‘Fire in a Field of Molten Flowers’. It’s a pre-echo of the also real-time-recorded (but conversely understated) haunting pulse and signal transmissions in the rarefied oceanic atmosphere of Audio Dependent’s ‘Fritz’.
While the unpredictable potentialities of analogue prevail as a sane response to a bleak, decayed future, throughout HFF Vol. 1 an inevitable symbiotic osmosis through the eye of the digital needle manifests. The visual component of this release was shot on physical 16mm film, but can be streamed in HD online, the chemistry of its optical grains enshrouded in a pixelated patina. We have digital’s empowering desktop cloning capability to thank for revealing to the world analogue’s beautiful bubblebath of imperfections – and the compelling paradoxes that occur when that hybrid produces a new synthesis. Welcome to the delightfully absurd mutation of Hackney Film Festival’s inaugural phono-graphic transmission. Languish in the mutant architectonics of its black sun, there’s more to come.
Stuart Heaney, the farside of Hackney Marshes, May 2014